The Ram Keys I Lifted Off the Hook

Quarter to Six

The kitchen was still full dark when I took his keys off the hook by the back door. A quarter to six, the coffee maker hissing out its last cup. The window over the sink was black except for the yard light catching all that new chrome in the driveway. The Ram. His Ram.

I stood there a second with the fob warm in my hand. These big trucks do not use a real key anymore, just a fat black fob on a ring, and Greg kept it on the second hook down. The one his daddy used to hang his cap on.

I had hung the carpool slip on the counter next to the sugar canister where he could not miss it. The address of the Casey’s lot. The time the carpool left. I underlined it once, not twice, because I was not angry. I was done.

I had never driven the Ram. He bought it in September, and in all that time I had sat in the passenger seat twice. It was his, he said, the way a man says a thing when he does not want to argue about it.

Fine. It was his. But my Equinox was mine, and it was gone, and a woman cannot get to a six a.m. shift on a feeling.

I pulled my work coat tight and went out into the cold. Central Illinois in January does not play. The step was iced and I held the rail.

The truck chirped and the lights came up bright across the garage door. I had to reach up for the grab handle to haul myself into a seat that still smelled like the dealer lot.

I adjusted the mirrors. I moved the seat forward six inches so my boots could reach the pedals. Then I backed it out slow, careful of the mailbox, and left him the cold driveway and the little slip of paper and the whole quiet rest of it.

I was not proud of myself. I want that on the record. I was forty-one years old and I had been married to Greg for nineteen of them, and I did not like becoming a woman who took the keys.

But I had tried the other thing. I had tried talking, and talking got me a seat on a carpool I did not ask for.

So I drove his truck to the plant. I parked it crooked across two spots in the front row, where everybody coming in for first shift would walk past it. And I clocked in at 5:58 with two minutes to spare.