My mother rolled down the window. She looked across the gravel at her grandson, standing at the edge of the yard in his gray sweatshirt with his hands in his pocket.
“Trace,” she said. “Come here.”
He walked slowly across the gravel to the driver’s side window. His face was pale. His eyes were red.
“Grandma,” he said. His voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was racing. I was racing Cody Hofmeister on the Road M mile, and I had it floored for three miles, and I heard it start to knock and I didn’t stop because I was winning.” He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “And then I came here and told you it was junk and tried to give you three hundred dollars for it. Because I wanted the engine for my race car.” He was crying now, in front of everyone. “I’m sorry. That was the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
My mother looked at him through the open window for a long time.
“Your grandfather drove this truck for twenty-four years,” she said. “He never once went over fifty-five. He changed the oil every three thousand miles and wrote it down in a notebook in the glove box.” She paused. “Did you look in the glove box, Trace?”
He shook his head.
“Look now.”
Trace reached through the window, past his grandmother, opened the glove box, and took out a small, worn, coffee-stained spiral notebook.
He opened it. Every page was filled with my father’s careful handwriting. Dates, odometer readings, oil changes, tire rotations. Every three thousand miles, for twenty-four years.
On the last page, in a shakier hand, Dad had written one more line. He’d written it about two months before he died.
For Trace, when he’s old enough. Take care of her and she’ll take care of you.
Trace stared at it.
“He wanted you to have this truck someday,” my mother said softly. “He told me so. He said you loved cars the way he did.”
Trace made a sound like something breaking. He bent over the open window with the notebook pressed against his chest and sobbed.
My mother reached out the window and put her small, wrinkled hand on the back of his neck, the way she used to when he was a little boy and scraped his knee.
“I know you’re sorry,” she said. “I could see it when you drove by those two Saturdays.”
“You saw me?”
“I see everything, honey. I’m your grandmother.” She patted his neck. “Now. Your Aunt Nora spent fifteen hundred and thirty dollars of her own money fixing your mess. And Lowell and Beryl gave up four Saturdays.”
Trace straightened up and wiped his face.
“I’ll pay it back,” he said. “All of it. Every dime.”
“I know you will,” my mother said. “But that’s not all.”
She looked over at Lowell and Beryl.
“These two men kept every truck in this county running for fifty years,” she said. “They taught your Aunt Nora everything she knows. And they’re not getting any younger.” She looked back at Trace. “You want to build race cars? Learn to build an engine first. From the inside. The right way.”
Lowell stepped forward. He looked at Trace for a long moment.
“Saturdays,” Lowell said. “My shop. Eight o’clock. You bring the donuts.”
Beryl nodded. “And you bring a notebook.”
Trace looked from one old man to the other.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Yes, sir.”Pages:
My mother drove the truck to the elevator the very next Monday morning, the first Monday in October.
I was there. I’d taken the morning off and was waiting in the co-op parking lot at five to eight, sitting on the tailgate of my own pickup with a cup of coffee.
At 7:58, I heard it coming down the county road from the south: a deep, smooth rumble.
The red and white Ford came around the corner and pulled into the elevator lot, sunlight flashing off the chrome bumper. My mother sat behind the wheel in her green cardigan, both hands on the wheel, sitting up very straight.
She pulled into her usual spot by the scale house.
Then she honked twice. Beep, beep.
The door to the elevator office flew open. Every man in the coffee crowd came out onto the steps. Lowell. Beryl. Kenny. Bud. Duane. The Pospisil brothers. They stood on the steps in their seed caps and jackets, clapping.
My mother climbed down out of the truck, smoothed her cardigan, and walked up the steps.
Lowell held the door for her.
Inside, somebody had already poured her a cup of coffee.
Trace started paying me back the following Friday. He came to my house after work at the tire shop and handed me an envelope. Inside was a check for $200 and a note in his handwriting on a page torn from a spiral notebook.
$1,530 total. $200 paid. $1,330 left. —T
He paid $200 every other Friday, from his paycheck. He paid it off in fifteen weeks, three weeks faster than I expected.
He sold the old Ford Galaxie race car project to a guy in Hastings for $2,100, used part of the money to pay off what he owed a buddy for the roll cage, and put the rest in a savings account at the bank in Fairfield.
“I’m going to build a race car,” he told me. “Someday. But I’m going to do it right. With my own money. Lowell says I’m not ready yet.”
“Are you?”
“No,” Trace said honestly. “I didn’t even know what a rod bearing was until Lowell showed me.”
He went to Lowell’s shop every Saturday at eight o’clock all that fall and winter, with a box of donuts from the bakery in Clay Center and a spiral notebook. Lowell and Beryl taught him everything. How to read a micrometer. How to check bearing clearance with Plastigage. How to torque a rod cap. How to listen to an engine and know what was wrong with it before you ever opened the hood.
Beryl told me in January, at the elevator, that Trace was the best student he’d had since me.
“He’s got the ears,” Beryl said. “Like you. Like Harlan.”Pages:14
In March, my mother asked me to drive her to see her lawyer in Fairfield, a young woman named Ms. Kubik.
“I want to update my will,” Mom said in the car. “I want to put the truck in it.”
Ms. Kubik’s office was above the bank on Main Street. She was in her thirties, sharp and kind, and she’d handled Dad’s small estate six years earlier. She listened while Mom explained.
“I want the truck to go to my grandson, Trace Brandt, when I die,” Mom said. “But only if he’s taken care of it. If he hasn’t, it goes to my daughter, Nora.”
Ms. Kubik frowned slightly. “That’s a hard condition to put in a will, Mrs. Brandt. Who decides whether he’s taken care of it?”
My mother thought about it.
“Nora decides,” she said. “She’s the mechanic.”
Ms. Kubik wrote the clause carefully. Mom’s 1966 Ford F-100, along with Dad’s maintenance notebook, would go to Trace when she died, provided her daughter Nora Brandt, as executor, was satisfied in her sole judgment that he’d maintained the truck properly in the meantime. If she wasn’t, the truck would go to Nora.
“And one more thing,” Mom said. “Until I die, Trace can drive the truck once a month. To the elevator and back, on a Monday morning. With me in the passenger seat. At fifty-five miles an hour.”
Ms. Kubik smiled. “That’s not really a will provision, Mrs. Brandt.”
“I know,” Mom said. “I just wanted it written down somewhere official.”
So Ms. Kubik wrote it on a separate piece of letterhead, as a letter of instruction, and Mom signed it.
Then Mom called Patty Rezac at the State Farm office and added Trace to her auto policy as an occasional driver. It raised her premium by $14 a month. Trace insisted on paying the difference himself.
That was a year and a half ago.
My mother is eighty now. She still drives the old Ford to the elevator every morning at eight. She still honks twice when she pulls in.
Lowell is eighty-two. He’s slowed down. He doesn’t stand up as fast, and he walks with a cane now. But he still goes to the elevator every morning, and he still sits in the same folding chair closest to the coffee pot.
Beryl’s tremor has gotten a little worse. He can’t drive anymore. Trace picks him up every Saturday morning in his black Dodge and drives him to Lowell’s shop, and then drives him to the elevator on Mondays. Beryl says Trace drives like an old lady now.
“Fifty-five,” Beryl says, rolling his eyes. “Every time. On the highway. I could walk faster.”
Trace is twenty-four. He still works at the tire shop on Main Street, but in January he enrolled in the diesel technology program at Central Community College in Hastings, two nights a week. He wants to work at the co-op someday. He told me he wants my job when I retire.
“You’ll have to wait a while,” I told him. “I’m only fifty-two.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “Lowell says patience is the most important tool in the box.”
On the first Monday of every month, Trace picks up his grandmother at the farmhouse at seven-forty. He drives the red and white Ford to the elevator, his grandmother in the passenger seat in her green cardigan, at exactly fifty-five miles an hour.
He pulls into Grandma’s spot by the scale house.
And he honks twice. Beep, beep.
Every man in the coffee crowd comes out onto the steps to watch Evelyn Brandt’s grandson climb down from the driver’s seat of Harlan’s truck, walk around to the passenger side, and open the door for her.
Last month, I was there. I’d stopped by the elevator to drop off a part for a grain truck. I watched Trace help his grandmother down from the cab. Then I watched him reach into the glove box, take out Dad’s old spiral notebook, and write something in it.
Later, when Mom and Trace were inside having coffee, I walked over to the truck and opened the glove box.
I flipped to the last page with writing on it.
Below my father’s shaky last line, For Trace, when he’s old enough. Take care of her and she’ll take care of you, there was a new line in Trace’s handwriting.
October 6th. 98,412 miles. Oil changed. Drove Grandma to the elevator. 55 mph the whole way. Taking care of her.
I closed the notebook, put it back in the glove box, and shut the door.
Then I stood there in the elevator parking lot in the October sunshine, with the old Ford ticking as it cooled beside me, and listened to the laughter drifting out of the office where my mother and her grandson were drinking bad coffee with a dozen old men.
Somewhere in there, I could hear Lowell telling a story about my father.
And I thought: Dad, she’s running fine.
Every single one of us is.
