The Widow Who Learned Three On The Tree

“It’s wasted out here, Nancy. On a widow who can’t even drive a stick.”

Brad said it with his hand flat on the fender, the way you would pat a horse you were about to buy.

It was the second Saturday in April. Dale had been gone four months and nine days. The big door of the machine shed was rolled open and the morning came in across the concrete and lit up the truck like it was on a stage.

A 1967 Chevrolet C10. Short bed. Seafoam green with a white roof. Three-speed on the column.

Dale had found it at a farm sale north of town with a tree growing up through the bed. He paid eighteen hundred dollars for it and hauled it home on a borrowed trailer, and I stood in the drive in my apron and said, “Dale Whitaker, what in the world.”

“Give me a year,” he said.

It took eleven.

Now my son-in-law was walking around it for the second time, and he was not looking at it the way family looks at a thing. He was looking at it the way he looks at a trade-in.

“No power steering,” Brad said. “No air. Drum brakes on all four corners. And nobody wants a manual anymore. I can’t give away a stick on my own lot.”

“I expect that’s so,” I said.

“It’s a nice old farm truck. I’m not saying it isn’t. But the market for these is thin, and it’s going to sit in here and the tires will flat-spot and the gas will go bad and the mice will get in the seat.” He straightened up. “I’d hate to see that happen to Dale’s truck.”

Brad is the sales manager at the Chevrolet dealership in town. He is forty-three, and he is good at his work. He has sold me two cars, and both times he took four hundred dollars off without my asking and called it the mother-in-law discount.

So when he named his number, I believed it was a real number.

“Thirty-five hundred,” he said. “Cash. I’d take it off your hands this week. And it stays in the family, which you can’t say if you run an ad.”

I looked at the truck.

Dale’s seed-company cap was on the dashboard, right where he had tossed it the last time he drove. I had not moved it. I had not moved anything. His coveralls were still on the nail by the workbench. His coffee can of odd bolts was still on the sill.

Thirty-five hundred dollars.

I had cooked in the grade school kitchen for twenty-nine years. I knew what thirty-five hundred dollars was. It was a new furnace, nearly.

It did not sound like eleven years of Sunday afternoons.

But I did not know one thing about what an old truck brings, and Brad did, and that was the plain fact of it.

He was right about the other thing, too. That was the part that sat in me like a swallowed stone.

I could not drive it.

In forty-four years of marriage I had never once sat behind that wheel, or the wheel of anything with a clutch. My daddy tried to teach me on a column shift when I was fifteen, in a ’59 Apache out in his pasture. I put it through a fence. He said some girls just were not built for it, and I believed him, the way you believe your daddy at fifteen.

After that I rode on the right-hand side. Dale drove.