The Game Day I Towed Them All

The first thing I saw that Saturday was a man I had never met standing in my iris bed, drinking a beer, at nine in the morning.

He lifted the can at me like we were old friends. “Morning,” he said. “Real good spot you got here.”

I stood on my own front steps in my robe and tried to understand what I was looking at.

There were seven cars in my driveway. Seven of them, nose to tail, stacked the way they stack them in the lot at the county fair.

Two more sat out on the lawn, tires sunk into the grass Dale had seeded by hand the last fall he was alive.

My son Denny was down at the end of the driveway in a folding camp chair with a fishing tackle box open on his knees, making change out of the top tray.

He had a dry-erase board propped against my mailbox post. GAME DAY PARKING, it said, in thick blocky capitals. Under that, $40. Under that, CASH ONLY.

I live in Carmody, which is a small town in the flat corn part of Indiana, and three blocks from my front door is the stadium where Weller State plays its football.

On a home Saturday this town triples. People drive in from four counties. They want to be close enough to walk to the gate, and close parking is gold, and I happen to own a double-wide concrete driveway two blocks off the stadium.

I had just never once in my life thought of it as money.

“Denny,” I called down the driveway. “Denny, what is all this.”

He did not even turn around. He was counting bills off against his thumb for a woman in a visor. “Morning, Ma,” he said. “You’re up early.”

“There is a man in my irises.”

“That’s Pruett. He’s fine. Pruett, don’t trample her flowers.”

Pruett took a half step sideways and stayed exactly where he was.

I want to tell this right, so I have to go back a little, because it did not start with nine cars. Nothing ever starts all at once. It comes on you one reasonable thing at a time until you look up and there is a stranger in your flower bed.

My husband Dale passed four years ago this coming January. His heart, out in the machine shed, on an ordinary Tuesday. He was sixty and then he was gone, and I learned to run the furnace and the mower and the checkbook all by myself.

I did all right. I am not a helpless woman. I worked twenty-six years in the office at the grain co-op and I know a ledger when I see one.

What I kept of Dale’s, besides the house, was his pickup. A 1994 Ford, the color of a robin’s egg where the sun has not got to it, parked in the second bay of the garage under a bedsheet.