Part 3 — Under the Seat
Vern shaky letters finished the sentence at the bottom of the oil-change receipt, and I read it out loud at my own kitchen counter.
“Look under the driver seat of my truck, Joyce. Where my thumbs wore the leather smooth.”
Krystal had already gone. Dustin sat very still in the recliner, staring at the floor.
I walked out to the driveway and opened the door of Verns old truck. I lay on my back on the gravel and felt along the underside of the seat springs, and my fingers touched tape.
It was a flat tin that had once held cough drops. Inside lay a paid-up life insurance policy for forty thousand dollars with my name on it, a note in his block capitals, and a key to a safe deposit box.
The note was short. “Joyce. I did not put this in the bank because Dustin knows my bank. Pay for my stone. Keep the rest. Help the boy only the way a doctor helps.”
My husband had planned everything for a world in which he was not there, and he had planned it with more mercy than I had the strength to feel.
Marlon sat with me on the tailgate while I called the sheriff, and this time it was not out of anger. I told the deputy the title had been signed with a dead mans name, and I wanted it recorded and nothing more.
Krystal came back that evening with her sister. She brought five thousand six hundred dollars in an envelope, the part of the sale money she had not yet spent, and she apologized with her eyes on the porch boards. The rest, thirty-six hundred and forty dollars, she would repay a little each payday.
Marlon took his nine thousand two hundred back in full and returned the bike without a word. He said that a man should never have to buy his best friend from a stranger.
Dustin did not make excuses. He asked the court for drug court, the way Vern would have wanted, and the judge granted a place in the program. I did not post a bond. I sat in the second row every Thursday.
The headstone went up in October, a plain gray stone with a motorcycle carved in the corner.
On the first Saturday after, Marlon rolled the Harley out of his truck and set it in my driveway at six in the morning. I stood in my nightgown on the porch and listened to it start.
Ten minutes. Just so I could hear it from bed.