My son-in-law hit my daughter until her left eye closed, put her out on the highway barefoot at two in the morning, and told her, “Cry to your daddy. He drags junk out of ditches for sixty bucks a pop. Nobody in this county will believe either of you.” By sunrise I was standing at his front door with one question.
She’d been married to him six years.
In six years she had never once called me after ten o’clock at night.
My phone went off at 2:14 on a Tuesday, her name on the screen, and nobody was talking.
“Marissa?”
Wind. A truck going by.
Then she said, “Daddy, can you come get me. I’m at the gas station by the interstate ramp.”
I took the wrecker instead of the car, because it was still warm from a midnight call and because it was the biggest thing I owned.
She was sitting on the curb by the ice machine.
Barefoot.
She was holding her right wrist in her lap like it belonged to somebody else.
Her left eye was swollen shut and her bottom lip was split down the middle.
I got down out of the cab and my legs wouldn’t do the last six feet.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make the face. Just take me home.”
So I took her home.
Rose’s coffee maker was still on the counter with a piece of masking tape on the lid that said DECAF in Rose’s handwriting. Four years, and I’d never pulled it off.
I called Dawn Shafer from across the road, because she did thirty years in the ER at County and because she’d come over in her bathrobe without asking me anything.
She asked Marissa plenty.
“Who did this, honey?”
Marissa looked at the table. “I fell.”
“On your wrist and your eye and your mouth,” Dawn said. “All at once.”
Nobody answered her.
“Alfredo, go make coffee,” Dawn said. “Not that one.”
She wrapped the wrist and said it needed an X-ray by morning and that she was calling the police.
Marissa grabbed her sleeve. “NO. You don’t get it. His dad eats lunch with the sheriff every Friday.”
Billy Kyriakos owned three car lots and a seat on the city council, and he made sure everybody in the county knew about both.
At the wedding he’d shaken hands with every guest under the tent except me.
In his toast he called me “the tow guy.” People laughed.
I let them. I’d been letting people laugh at me for forty years. It’s cheaper than arguing, and I never had much to spend.
Dawn gave Marissa two pills from her purse and Marissa went down on the couch under Rose’s old afghan.
Before she went under she caught my wrist.
“He said something, Daddy.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“He was laughing. He said, ‘Your daddy’s NOBODY. He tows drunks for a living, and nobody would take his word over a Kyriakos.'”
Her fingers let go. Her breathing went long and slow.
I sat in the chair beside her until the clock over the stove said 4:05.
Then I went out to the garage.
Bottom drawer of the gray file cabinet.
Behind the tax folders, behind Rose’s recipe binder that I never knew where else to put.
A yellow carbon tow ticket, folded in half, from April of 2009.
My handwriting. A plate number. A mile marker on the river road. A time, 3:52 a.m.
And a second plate number, written smaller, in the margin.
I’d kept that paper seventeen years. I never showed it to a living soul, not even Rose.
I put it in my shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
At 5:50 I backed the wrecker up their long driveway in Paducah, past the two stone lions, and stopped six inches off the bumper of Jamison’s black pickup.
His daddy bought him that truck the year he made vice president of a car lot he never once worked at.
I hooked it.
Chains, straps, the whole job. It took me eleven minutes. I’ve done it in the rain in four.
The porch light came on at the sound of the winch.
Jamison came out in a gray robe with his phone already up, filming me.
He was smiling.
“Wow,” he said. “You know this is grand theft, right, old man? You know I’ll have you in a cell by seven?”
“Then call him.”
“Where’s my wife?”
“Asleep.”
“She tell you she fell?” He laughed. “She falls a lot. Clumsy. Probably gets it from her mother’s side.”
My hands were very steady. That was the strange part.
“Put your father on the phone,” I said.
“My father,” Jamison said, “doesn’t take calls from the TOW GUY.”
He came down two steps so he could look down at me from closer.
“Here’s what happens now. You unhook my truck. You drive that rust bucket back to wherever you crawled out of. And tonight Marissa comes home and apologizes to my mother for the scene she made.”
I unbuttoned my pocket.
I took the yellow ticket out, unfolded it, and held it up where the porch light could hit it.
He squinted.
He didn’t know what it was.
But his thumb came off the screen.
“Jamison,” I said. “You were seventeen that April. So I’ll ask you, since your daddy never would. Who was behind the wheel of his silver sedan the night I pulled it out of the river, and what happened to THE OTHER CAR?”
The phone went face down on the step.
The brick steps
Jamison picked the phone back up. He didn’t look at it.
“I was,” he said. “I was seventeen and drunk and I put Dad’s car in the river. You think that’s news? Everybody who needs to know already knows.”
“The other car was a little blue Civic,” I said. “A girl named Kaylee Calhoun was in it, down in the trees across the road. A school bus driver found her at 6:40 that morning. Her pelvis was broken in two places.”
He stood there in the robe.
“There wasn’t any other car.”
“I’ve got the plate in my own handwriting.”
“There wasn’t any other car,” he said again, louder, like the volume settled it.
I folded the ticket and put it back in my pocket and buttoned the flap. Then I walked around to the back of the wrecker and started letting his truck down. The hook was so he’d come outside without Marissa in the house. That was all it was ever for.
Straps first, then the chains, then the winch. Eleven minutes going up, nine coming down. He didn’t film any of it.
When the front tires touched the concrete he said, “Who else has seen that paper?”
“Nobody.”
“Then it’s your word.” He tried the smile again and it didn’t hold. “And my dad was there. He’d have told me about a girl.”
I climbed up into the cab.
He came down the last step barefoot onto the driveway, which was cold enough that he stood on the sides of his feet.
“He’d have told me,” Jamison said.
Mile marker 9
Billy called the house line at 3:20 that morning in 2009. Not county dispatch, which is how a call is supposed to come.
Rose rolled over and said, “Who died?”
“Nobody,” I said. I believed that for about forty minutes.
The silver sedan was nose down in the shallows off the river road with the water up to the door handles. Billy stood on the bank in suit pants soaked to the chest. Every time he pointed at the car I could see the inside of his left forearm, a red stripe up it, raw, about two fingers wide.
I’ve pulled a lot of people off blown airbags. They all have that stripe.
His Escalade sat on the shoulder with the engine running. In the back seat a boy in a letter jacket was asleep against the window. Small kid. A hundred and thirty pounds if he was wet, and he wasn’t. His hair was dry. The whole truck smelled like beer.
“My son was driving,” Billy said. “A deer. I want it on my lot, not the impound. You understand me?”
I pulled the sedan up the bank and did what I do on every water job, because the adjusters always ask. I opened the driver’s door and wrote down where the seat was.
Seat full back.
Across the road the guardrail was folded in, the paint scraped off it fresh. I walked over with my flashlight. Down in the brush sat the back end of a small blue car, no lights on. I read the plate. I called “Hey” down there twice.
Nothing.
“That’s been sitting there since Saturday,” Billy said behind me. “County’s problem.”
I wrote the plate small, in the margin, on the side he couldn’t see.
At his lot he gave me an envelope with five hundred-dollar bills in it. I took it.
Thursday’s paper said a nineteen-year-old named Kaylee Calhoun had been found by a school bus driver at 6:40 a.m. on the river road, in her car in the trees, alive. Single-vehicle accident, the sheriff said. No witnesses.
I drove to the sheriff’s office that afternoon and sat in the lot forty minutes with the engine off. Then I drove home. Who was going to take the tow guy’s word over a Kyriakos? The five hundred went for Marissa’s braces.
Kaylee Calhoun works window three at the county clerk’s now. I file my abandoned-vehicle titles there on the first of every month. She walks with a cane, and she calls me Mr. Nunley.
When I got home Tuesday at 6:40, Dawn was at the table with her coffee and Marissa was still under the afghan.
Dawn held up my cell phone. I’d left it on the charger.
Six missed calls. Kyriakos Motors, every one.
Deputy Guillermo
The seventh call came while I was taking my boots off.
“Alfredo.” Billy said my name like we golfed together. “We’re family now. Kids fight. You had a long night. Bring me that old piece of paper, come to lunch Friday, and we’ll forget about my son’s truck.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Good. Because you took my money, and you walked away from that girl, and if you tell it, you tell all of it.” He hung up.
At nine a county car came up the gravel. The deputy was a young man named Guillermo who’d bought his own Camaro back out of my lot twice. He held his hat in his hand.
“Mr. Kyriakos filed on the truck,” he said. “There’s video. He says he won’t press it if you stay off the property.”
“Look at her,” I said. “Look at her face and then talk to me about a truck.”
Guillermo looked at Marissa on the couch.
“Ma’am, did somebody do that to you?”
“I fell,” Marissa said.
“Tell him,” I said. “Marissa. Tell him.”
“Daddy, stop.”
Guillermo wrote me a trespass warning on a yellow pad, tore it off and set it on the counter next to Rose’s coffee maker. At the door he said, quieter, “Sheriff said to tell you Billy says hello.”
Dawn waited until the car was gone.
“Not the sheriff,” she said. “There’s a state police post on the highway past the Walmart. Those boys don’t eat lunch with anybody.”
Marissa sat up. Her good eye was on me.
“You go to anybody, and I’m going back to him tonight.”
County X-ray
Dawn drove us to County for the wrist because my hands had decided they were done being steady.
Broken in two places. The tech who put the splint on had a cartoon pickle tattooed on her forearm, and I couldn’t tell you why I remember that.
On the way home Marissa sat in the back with her arm across her lap. Dawn kept both hands on the wheel and said nothing, which I had never seen her do.
Past the river road exit Marissa said, “You don’t know him.”
“I know enough.”
“He doesn’t remember it, Daddy. The river. He doesn’t remember any of it.”
Dawn’s eyes came up to the mirror.
“He was drinking at some party, and the next thing he knows it’s morning. His dad’s sitting on the end of his bed telling him what he did. Put the car in the water, almost killed them both, and his daddy fixed it.” She picked at the edge of the splint. “Every April Billy takes him to lunch at the club. Just the two of them. And the week after that lunch is the bad week.”
“How many bad weeks?”
She didn’t answer that one.
“He tells it like a story,” she said. “He woke up in his own bed with his hair dry. He always tells that part.”
At home I went out to the garage, pulled the chain on the lamp over the workbench and unfolded the ticket under it.
The plate. Mile marker 9. 3:52 a.m. The second plate, small, in the margin.
And down in the corner, in my handwriting, two words for an adjuster who never called.
Seat full back.
Ten after seven
Billy came himself on Wednesday.
A black Escalade, newer than the one at the river, pulled onto the gravel at ten after seven. He walked into the garage without knocking, sleeves rolled to the elbow, carrying a white envelope.
“Ten thousand,” he said, and set it on the workbench. “For the inconvenience. For her wrist. Whatever you want to call it.”
The ticket was on the bench under my hand.
“Your boy was five foot six that spring,” I said. “Hundred and thirty pounds.”
“So?”
“You’re six-three.”
Billy laughed. “You wrote down a seat.”
“I wrote down a seat.”
He reached for the ticket. His left arm came across the bench under the lamp, and there it was, up the inside of the forearm, pale and shiny now, two fingers wide.
I put my hand flat on the paper.
He looked where I was looking. Then he pulled the arm back and rolled the sleeve down over it and did up the cuff button.
“He was a drunk kid asleep in my back seat,” Billy said. “If it was me, I lose the lots. I lose the council. I lose all of it, over a deer and a girl who lived. So it was him. He was seventeen. It never cost him a thing.”
“It cost my daughter a wrist.”
“That’s between a husband and his wife.”
He pushed the envelope an inch toward me.
“Seventeen years you couldn’t say any of this out loud, Alfredo. You still can’t. Your name’s on that paper too. You hauled the car to my lot. You took my money. You stood at that rail and walked off and left her down there.”
He went to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
“Friday at noon. My son’s house. You bring it, or you’re off the county rotation by Monday.”
Two stone lions
Friday at eight I drove to the state police post past the Walmart and handed the ticket to a trooper with a gray ponytail.
My statement took two hours. I told her about the stripe and the dry hair and the seat. I told her about the five hundred and the braces. I told her I called “Hey” twice and then took a man’s word because it was easier.
When I came out, Marissa wasn’t in the truck where I’d left her.
She was inside at the second desk with her splint on the counter and a trooper’s pen in her good hand.
At noon I parked the wrecker at the bottom of the long driveway with nothing on the hook. Billy was on the porch. Jamison was on the steps. His mother stood in the doorway in a cardigan, holding a dish towel.
“Where is it,” Billy said.
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it, Alfredo?”
“State police post.”
Billy came down off the porch. “You stupid old man. You know what you did? You put yourself in it. Evidence, money, a girl in a ditch, your name in your own handwriting. I already called the county. You’re off the rotation. Every title you ever filed, I’ll have somebody look at it. You think anybody in this county is going to take the word of a man who drags junk out of ditches over mine? Over mine?”
“Dad,” Jamison said. “What paper?”
“Go in the house.”
“Who was driving?”
“You were,” Billy said. “We’ve been over it. You were.”
His mother put the dish towel down on the porch rail.
“I washed that suit, Billy,” she said. “It was wet to the collar. His jacket was dry. I hung it up myself.”
Billy turned around. “You keep out of this.”
“I kept out of it seventeen years.”
Jamison looked at his father, and then at me, and something in his face went quick and practical.
“So it wasn’t me,” he said. “Okay. Then Marissa can come home. You tell her. You tell her it wasn’t me.”
“She was at the post this morning,” I said. “At the second desk.”
He sat down on the step.
Billy was still talking. Lawyers, the council, the sheriff, Friday lunch. Nobody on the porch was listening to him anymore.
“Dad,” Jamison said. “It wasn’t me?”
Billy didn’t answer him.
The ice machine
My phone went off at 2:09 on a Thursday, three weeks later.
The private calls are the only ones I get now, and they come at night. A woman with a flat at the gas station by the interstate ramp. No spare, and her husband’s in Ohio.
The county titles stopped. On the first of the month I went to the clerk’s office anyway and stood in line at window three with nothing to file. Kaylee Calhoun had read the paper. She looked at me a long time over the counter.
“Next,” she said.
On the fridge there’s a trooper’s card with two case numbers on the back in ballpoint, mine on top and Marissa’s under it.
The DECAF tape is still on Rose’s coffee maker.
I was pulling my boots on in the kitchen when the light came on in the spare room. Marissa came out in her sweatshirt with the cast on her wrist and sat on the bottom stair and tied her sneakers, one-handed, slow, the way the therapist showed her.
“I’m coming,” she said, and went out ahead of me to the cab.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has been keeping a piece of paper in a drawer too long.
Family money and old wounds come to a head in “I Paid My Son $1,380 a Month for His Basement. He Picked the Number.” and “Dad Called Him ‘The Son I Got To Pick.’ I Knew His Laugh.”. And if you’re drawn to secrets that surface years later, there’s “The Bag Held His Birth Certificate And A Death Certificate I’d Never Seen”.
