The Truck My Brother Sold For Scrap

Rick slid the deposit slip across Dad’s kitchen table with one finger, the way you’d push a plate back when you were done with it.

“Nine hundred,” he said. “Lyle’s man came out Tuesday with the rollback. It’s handled.”

I looked at the slip. Nine hundred dollars and no cents, dated two days after our father died and two days before we put him in the ground.

“What’s handled?” I said.

“The Ford.”

I want the week laid out plain, because it matters. Dad’s heart quit in his sleep on a Sunday night, seventy-six years old, with his boots by the back door and the wheat just up. Rick called the scrap yard Monday. The truck left the place Tuesday. We buried Dad on Thursday. This was Friday morning, and it was the first I had heard of any of it. There were still three foil pans of somebody’s cheesy potatoes in his refrigerator and a stack of sympathy cards on the counter nobody had opened, and my brother was sitting in Dad’s chair with Dad’s coffee cup, telling me he had sold Dad’s pickup to the scrap yard.

“You sold the truck,” I said.

“I sold a 1978 pickup that hasn’t turned over in two years, Tom.” He didn’t raise his voice. Rick never does. He is six years older than me, and he has always talked to me like he’s reading me the back of a feed sack. “It’s nothing but rust. The cab corners are gone. Mice have been in the seat. It was taking up a whole bay in the shed, and I’ve got a planter to get in there before the weather turns.”

“You could have asked me.”

“Asked you what? If you wanted to pay to have it hauled?” He picked the slip back up and folded it into his shirt pocket. “You live in town. You’ve got a two-car garage with two cars in it. Where were you going to put it?”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s the whole point. Somebody has to decide things out here. That’s been me for a good while now.”

That one was meant to land, and it did. Rick stayed. I left. He has farmed that ground beside Dad since he was nineteen, and I went off to tech school in Salina and came back only as far as Abilene, nine miles short. I fix combines at the implement dealer. I come out on Sundays. Rick has never once said out loud that I got off easy, and he has never needed to.

My daughter was standing in the doorway to the front room. I hadn’t heard her come in. Josie is thirteen. She had been in there going through her grandpa’s box of photographs, and she had one in her hand.

“Grandpa’s truck?” she said. “The one in the shed?”

Nobody answered her.

“Uncle Rick. The one I rode in?”

“It didn’t run, Josie,” Rick said, a little gentler. “It was just sitting.”

“It was his, though.”

She looked at me then, not at him. Her chin was doing the thing it has done since she was two. She held up the photograph like it was evidence. It was her, about six years old, standing on the bench seat of that truck with both hands on the wheel, and my father’s big arm stretched across the seat back behind her so she wouldn’t fall.

“Dad,” she said. “They crush them. Out at Lyle’s. I’ve seen the flat ones on the trailer.”