The Truck Waiting at the Curb

On Monday he sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and asked me about the parade, because Gwen had told him on the phone, and Gwen is not a woman who leaves a thing half said.

“I don’t want to take it away from the post,” he said. “They planned it. The men at that post have been good to this family since Granddad’s day.”

“So what do you want to do?”

He turned the cup. “I want to drive her down Main Street. The way Uncle Rick told them I would.”

I did not argue. I called the post commander myself, a retired Navy man named Hank Wendt who had once changed a flat tire in my lot and refused to let me charge him.

I told him the truck would be there Saturday, and that Cody would be at the wheel, and that I would explain the rest after the parade. Hank was quiet a moment.

“Mrs. Hale,” he said. “I have had a bad feeling since the second Tuesday of last month. I think I’ll just say I’m glad to hear it.”

Gwen came by Wednesday with the banner. It was a long strip of white vinyl rolled in a trash bag, and she carried it up my porch steps like a woman carrying something she had made herself.

“He ordered it from the sign shop in Catoosa,” she said. “I picked it up this morning and told them I was the committee’s wife. Which is true.”

“Gwen, you don’t have to be there.”

“Margo.” She set the roll on my table.

“I have been married thirty years to a man who stood up in front of everybody he knows and told them something he knew wasn’t so. I’d like to be somewhere that’s true.”

The Saturday before Veterans Day came up cold and bright, the kind of sky you only get in Oklahoma in November, with a hard blue edge to it. Claremore closed off Main Street at nine.

The high school band lined up outside the courthouse, with the drum line stamping their feet.

There were Boy Scouts and a fire engine and the tractor club and four horses from the saddle club, and a flatbed of old men in folding chairs with blankets on their knees.

I had washed the truck at six that morning in my own driveway. Cody had wiped the chrome.

Gwen sat in the middle of the bench seat between us with one end of the banner across her lap and the other out the window, and she did not say a word the whole way in.

The reviewing stand was at the courthouse corner, a plywood platform with bunting and a folding table and a microphone on a stand.

I saw my brother before he saw us. He stood at the table in his good coat, with a clipboard against his chest.

He was running the parade the way a man runs it who has been running it for ten years, pointing and nodding and counting vehicles.

He looked up the street for the first float. Then he looked at the lead slot, which was empty.

Hank Wendt walked out to the middle of the street. The band went quiet. He took the microphone from the stand, and his voice carried all the way to the courthouse steps.