Phil came out the street door behind us.
He stood on the sidewalk with his glasses still in his hand.
“Wade.”
I waited.
“I never asked him for this. I want you to know that. I didn’t know a thing about it till Don called me.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I don’t know what he was thinking.”
“I don’t either.”
He opened his mouth to say something else. I could see it was something hard. And I watched him decide not to say it.
He nodded once and walked to his car.
I let him go.
I’ve thought about that moment a good deal since. If either one of us had said one more sentence on that sidewalk, we’d have saved ourselves four months.
But we were Albert Kucera’s sons, both of us. And Albert’s sons did not say the extra sentence.
I drove out to the home place that afternoon to get what was mine.
The truck was sitting in the north bay of the machine shed. Right where Dad backed it in on the evening of February second, after he fed the calves.
He died the next night. In his recliner, with the cattle market report on the TV. I found him in the morning, when he didn’t come out to the lots.
So the truck was parked the way he parked it. Nosed out. Wheels straight.
It was white once. Thirty winters had turned it to chalk. The doors still had the ghost of a seed dealer’s name where a decal had peeled off years ago. It had the 466 diesel, a five-speed with a two-speed axle, and a mixer box on the back. There was a dent in the discharge chute from a morning in 2003 when Dad caught the corner of a feed bunk and said a word my mother made him apologize to the dog for.
I climbed up and sat behind the wheel.
His chore gloves were on the dash.
Yellow leather gone brown. Laid one on top of the other. And curled. Curled into exactly the shape of his hands holding a steering wheel.
I sat there and looked at those gloves until the windshield fogged up.
There was a seed corn cap on the passenger side of the bench seat. A pair of fencing pliers on the floor. The cab smelled like ground corn and diesel and peppermints. He kept peppermints in his shirt pocket to hide the fact that he still chewed tobacco after the doctor told him to quit.
The truck was plugged in, so it started on the first try.
I unplugged it. I coiled the cord on the hook the way he did.
And I drove it eleven miles home at forty-five miles an hour, with the heater roaring and my father’s gloves riding on the dash in front of me.
I didn’t move them.
I haven’t moved them yet.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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