The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

He was right. That was the part that landed hardest. I had thought I was building a bridge, and to my son I was building a monument.

I had been trying to talk to him through a car because I did not know how to talk to him any other way, and he had been calling a parts counter every March to ask about a car because that was the only way he knew to ask about me.

Two men, one language, and neither of us knew it had a second word.

“Call him,” I said. I got up. I was shaking. “I’ll drive up. I’ll leave right now.”

“He’ll let it ring,” Roric said. “And if you show up on his porch at midnight with that face on, he’ll think somebody died.” He picked up his Thermos. “I called him yesterday. First time I ever called him. I told him I was done holding the line and I’d be driving up Thursday.”

“You were going to drive to Wichita?”

“I’m seventy-one, Verlon, not dead.” He almost smiled. “You do the one thing. Fire that engine. Saturday, ten o’clock. I told him that. I told him Saturday at ten.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say he’d come,” Roric said. “He didn’t say he wouldn’t.”

I told Yolanda that night. I sat her down at the kitchen table and I told her all of it, the ditch, the sentence, what I had meant, what he had heard, and Roric, and the Marches, and I did not leave out the part where I was a coward for five years.

She did not say a word until I finished. Then she put her hand flat on the table, palm down.

“I tried to tell him,” she said. “The second Christmas. I said, ‘Dace, honey, your father didn’t mean the car.’ And he said, ‘Mom, don’t make excuses for him.'” Her voice cracked.

“And I thought, maybe I am. Maybe I have been. You never gave me one thing to say, Verlon. Not one thing. All I had was what I knew you were like.”

“I know.”

“Four times a year,” she said, “I got in a car and drove to him, and I looked at that boy and I did not say, he built it for you. Because you never said it. I couldn’t carry something for you that you hadn’t said.”

Roric left before dawn on Thursday in his Buick LeSabre, with a bag of sandwiches Yolanda had made and a map he did not need. He was gone two days. He did not call.

I worked the shop alone, answering the counter phone, and I will tell you that the word “Pittaway” in my mouth did not sound like a verdict. It sounded like a question.

Friday night at nine the house phone rang, and it was Roric, calling from a motel in Chanute.

“I’m coming home,” he said. “I’m not saying anything. You fire that engine at ten.”

“Roric.”

“Go to bed, Verlon.”

I did not go to bed.

Saturday morning was cold and bright, thirty-eight degrees, a high October sky. I was at the shop at five. I put two gallons of fresh gas in the tank and set the battery in its tray and tightened the clamps. I wiped down the Duster’s fender, which did not need it.