The Duster My Son Would Not Come Home For

At eight, Yolanda came in carrying a thermos of her own and two folding chairs, and she set them in the open bay and said nothing and sat down in one of them with her purse in her lap.

Roric arrived at nine, shaved, in a clean flannel, his Thermos under his arm. He sat on an upturned bucket by the parts counter.

At nine-fifty a truck turned off Route K into the lot. A gray Ford with Kansas plates and a light bar rack on the roof. It rolled to a stop and the engine cut off. Nobody got out.

I was standing at the front fender of the Duster. I did not move. My whole body had gone to wire. Yolanda took in a breath beside me, and let it out very slowly.

The driver’s door opened. He stood there for a while with one hand on the door frame.

He was twenty-four. I had last seen him at nineteen, a boy with a strap across his chest. The man who walked toward the bay was broader through the shoulders, with a line crew’s forearms and a short beard I had not expected.

There was a white scar through his left eyebrow that I had stitched into my memory in red. He stopped at the edge of the concrete where the bay door had been rolled up, in the cold light, and he looked at the car.

He did not look at me. He looked at the car for a long time. At the shine in the paint, the line down the quarter panel that Roric had hunted down in a Carthage weed field, the Rallye wheels. The tail lamps. The D on the cowl, which I had left alone.

“You left the D,” he said. His voice was rough. “On the cowl. I scratched that when I was seventeen. Mom said you stripped the paint down to the metal.”

“I did,” I said. “I didn’t touch it. I painted around it.”

He nodded slowly. Then he looked at me, finally, and I saw my own face in his, at an age I did not remember being.

“Roric came to my door on Thursday,” Dace said. “Seventy-one years old. Slept on my couch two nights. Snores like a chainsaw.” Somebody on the bucket by the counter made a small sound.

“He told me what you said, and what you meant. He tried it on the phone in year two and I shut him down. This time he stood on my porch until I listened.”

“Son,” I said.

“I’m not done.” He drew a breath. His hands were shaking at his sides. “For five years I thought my dad looked at me bleeding in a ditch and cared more about a car.

I thought, okay, that’s what I am to him. A guy who scratched his paint. And I called the parts counter every March because I could not stop wanting to know if you were still, if you were still, in there.

Doing it. And every year Roric said the quarter panel’s done, the floor’s done, he painted it at night, he talks to it, and I thought, he really did love it more. He really did.”

“Dace.”

“And that’s why I never called you back.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “I wasn’t mad about the wreck. I know it wasn’t my fault. I was just done being less than a car.”

I crossed twelve feet of concrete I had crossed ten thousand times, and it was the longest walk of my life.