The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

The alley dock is where you back the trailer at an angle into a box, like backing into a loading dock between two other trucks.

You have to do it without hitting a cone and without too many pull-ups.

The first week I hit a cone almost every single time. I would turn the wheel the right way and the trailer would go the wrong way, or I would turn too much and the trailer would come around like a dog chasing its tail.

The instructor was a retired driver with a white mustache who said very little. On the fourth day he climbed up onto the step of my truck and spoke through the window.

“Stop watching your hands,” he said. “Watch the trailer. Small corrections. If you have to make a big one, you waited too long.”

I wrote that on an index card and taped it to the dashboard of my own car. Watch the trailer. Small corrections. I still have that card.

There was one afternoon in the third week when I could not do anything right.

I hit the same cone four times in a row, and the farm kid from Nebraska had to go out and stand it back up each time.

I sat in the cab afterward with the engine idling and I cried. Not loud. Just enough that I had to wait before I could get out.

I thought about the twenty dollars on the tablecloth beside the cranberry sauce. I thought about how Curtis would tell it at Easter. “She lasted three weeks.”

Then I thought about Grandma Hazel, who had driven a grain truck during harvest every summer of her married life, and who had pulled me aside at the door that Thanksgiving and said, “Don’t you listen to him.”

I wiped my face on my coat sleeve and I asked the instructor if I could stay late.

He let me run the alley dock eleven more times. I hit the cone on the first two and never again.

You have to hold your learner’s permit for fourteen days before you can take the skills test.

I had mine since December. By the end of February the school said I was ready to test.

I tested on a gray morning in early March. The pre-trip went fine. The air brake test went fine.

Then the examiner, a woman with reading glasses on a chain, said, “Offset back, please,” and walked to the edge of the range to watch.

I did it in one pull-up. Then she gave me the alley dock, and I did it with none.

When I got out of the cab, my legs shook so badly that I had to hold the grab handle for a second before I could walk.

The road test was forty minutes of town streets, a highway on-ramp, a railroad crossing, and a right turn so tight I swung wide and held my breath. She did not say a word the whole drive.

When we got back, she wrote on her clipboard for what felt like a year. Then she looked up over her reading glasses and said, “Congratulations. You passed.”

I called Grandma Hazel first. Not Emmett, not my daughter. Hazel. I do not know why, except that she was the one who had told me not to listen.