The Secret My Father Kept In The Garage

The Siren On A Quiet Road

The county road my father lives on doesn’t get much traffic. A propane truck twice a month. The mail carrier around eleven. Kids on four wheelers after school, cutting across the Hendersons’ back forty because the ditch is shallow there and nobody minds.

So when I heard a siren coming up that road on a Saturday morning in September, I knew before I even stood up from the porch swing that it was headed for my father’s driveway and nowhere else.

I’d driven down from Memphis the night before, the way I try to every few weeks, mostly so my dad doesn’t spend every single evening alone with the television turned up too loud and a plate of something reheated for one. I was on the porch with a cup of coffee that had already gone lukewarm, watching the fog burn off the soybean field across the road, when the patrol car came around the bend faster than it needed to and swung into our gravel without slowing down enough for gravel.

No lights. Just speed, and a second car pulling in right behind it, an unmarked sedan that I would later learn belonged to the county’s animal control liaison.

My father is Lamont. Seventy four years old this past March. He buried my mother, Delores, almost six years ago now, and he has lived alone on this half acre outside Tupelo every day since, in the same low brick house he built additions onto three separate times over forty years, always for a reason that made sense to him at the time.

He was in the side yard when the cars pulled in, wearing the same canvas coveralls he wears to do everything from split wood to change the oil in his truck. He didn’t run. He didn’t even flinch, really. He just straightened up slow, the way his knees make him do everything slow now, and watched the doors open.

I was already down the porch steps by the time the first deputy was out of his car.