The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

“Don’t you apologize to me about a car,” is what I meant to say. “Don’t you ever. You are the thing. You are the only thing.”

What came out was: “You ruined it. You ruined the only thing I ever loved.”

I want you to hear it the way he heard it. He had just said the word car. He was looking past my shoulder, because that is where the Duster was, with its crumpled quarter panel and its steam.

His father knelt over him and said you ruined the only thing I ever loved, and the thing he had just apologized for was sitting twenty feet away in a ditch.

I saw his face shut. I did not understand what I was seeing. It closed like the bay door at five o’clock, a smooth drop, nothing left showing but a seam.

Roric was standing behind me. I did not know until years later what he had seen.

The paramedics came with the board, and I stood up with Dace’s blood on my shirt, and I said nothing else, because I believed I had said the thing that mattered and the rest would follow when we got home.

That is the first confession. I said it, and I did not check what landed.

The second confession is longer, and it takes up the rest of this.

The emergency room in Lamar kept him overnight.

Eleven stitches over the eye, a clean break of the collarbone, a sprained wrist, and a concussion that had him asking the same three questions every twenty minutes until the sun came up.

Yolanda drove in from the school cafeteria where she has worked for twenty-six years and found me in the hallway still wearing the shirt.

“What did you say to him?” she asked. She asked it before she asked how he was.

“Nothing he didn’t need to hear,” I said, because that was the kind of man I had made myself.

She looked at me for a long moment, and I could not read it then. She was not angry. She was counting.

Alvin Pickett lost his license for a year and paid the insurance claim in full. I learned it from the adjuster, and I could not find anything in me to say about it either way.

He came home to his old room for two weeks with his arm strapped across his chest. We lived around each other.

He would say, “Hey, Dad,” in a voice you would use for the man who reads the electric meter. He didn’t mention the car.

I didn’t mention it either, because I was waiting for him to ask about it so that I could say, as gruffly as I could manage, that the car did not matter, that it was sheet metal.

I had the speech ready. I never gave it. He never asked.

On the fourteenth day he told his mother, not me, that he had taken a job with a line crew out of Wichita, Kansas, climbing poles for a power cooperative. He had been talking to a recruiter since the summer, he said. He would leave the next morning.

I stood in the doorway of his room that last night. He was zipping a duffel bag. I said, “Son.”

“I know where I stand, Dad,” he said. He didn’t turn around. “You don’t have to say it again.”

I took that as being about the wreck.