My son took the $41,000 I’d put away for my knee surgery and told me, “Drive nights, Mom, you’ve got nothing else going on.”
So I drove nights.
Just after three in the morning a girl threw herself into my back seat and begged me not to stop, and I didn’t, not until sunrise, not until she saw the picture on my visor.
The money was for a new right knee.
Mine had been bone on bone for two years, and the surgeon in Toledo had me on his calendar for the second week of January.
Israel said he needed it for six months.
A food truck, a partner, a sure thing.
By October the account had nineteen dollars in it and he’d stopped picking up.
When I finally caught him at his apartment door, he didn’t even let me in.
That’s when he told me to drive nights.
So I called Curtis.
Curtis had lived across the street from me for twenty-two years and owned two old cabs he couldn’t keep drivers in.
“Overnight’s yours if you want it,” he said.
“Just don’t let anybody in the back you don’t like the look of.”
I took number 238, a seat with a dip in it, and a brace under my jeans.
Eleven nights in, I was parked outside an all-night pancake place, eating sunflower seeds and watching the clock.
The back door flew open.
She was in before I could turn around.
Maybe twenty-four. Bare feet. One sandal in her fist.
“Drive,” she said. “Please. Don’t stop anywhere.”
“Where am I taking you, hon?”
“Anywhere with lights. Anywhere people are.”
I pulled out.
In my mirror a gray SUV rolled out of the side lot behind us with its headlights off.
Then they came on.
I didn’t take the highway.
I stuck with the main roads and stopped at EVERY red light, right under the streetlamps, past the gas stations that never close.
The SUV stayed two cars back for almost twenty minutes.
“He’s still there,” she said.
“I see him.”
“If you pull over he’ll—”
“I’m NOT pulling over,” I said. “Not for anybody.”
At a gas station on a corner I rolled up to the pump nearest the window, where the kid at the register could see us, and sat there with the engine running.
The SUV went past slow.
It didn’t come back.
Her shoulders kept shaking so hard the seat squeaked.
I turned the heat all the way up and passed my bag of sunflower seeds back over the seat.
I keep them for my blood sugar.
She ate ALL of them, shells and everything, and said sorry twice.
Her phone kept lighting up on her leg.
She kept it face down with her thumb pressed over the edge, as if the name could get out.
I didn’t ask.
Around four, my own phone buzzed in the cup holder.
Israel.
“You driving tonight?”
He hadn’t sent me a text after ten o’clock in his whole grown life.
Then a second one.
“Where are you right now. Need you.”
I turned mine face down too.
“Somebody looking for you?” she said.
“My son. He can wait.”
She laughed once, small and ugly, and then she cried for about a mile.
I shut the meter off and kept going.
The lake road. The loop around the hospital.
Past the pancake place twice, slow, so she could see the lot was empty.
By six she’d stopped shaking.
She leaned forward between the seats to ask what she owed me.
And that’s when she saw the picture.
It’s been clipped to my visor since 2009.
Israel at nineteen, at the lake, holding up a bass and squinting into the sun.
“Who’s that,” she said.
“That’s MY SON.”
She sat all the way back.
“Pull over.”
“Honey, you said—”
“Pull over HERE. Please.”
I stopped at a bus shelter.
She got out barefoot and walked away fast and never once looked back.
The sandal was still on my floor mat.
I didn’t throw it out. I still don’t know why.
Israel never texted again.
Not that morning, not the next day, not the one after.
Three days later I limped into Curtis’s lot at four in the afternoon to pick up the cab.
A man was walking down the row, reading the numbers on the doors.
Fifties. Work jacket. A folded sheet of notebook paper in his hand.
He stopped at 238.
Then he turned and found me.
“Mrs. Dunne?”
Curtis put his coffee down on a hood and came over.
“Who’s asking,” Curtis said.
“Rashid,” the man said.
“Ayanna’s father. You drove my daughter around all night Thursday.”
I got into the driver’s seat because my knee was going.
He bent down at my window.
“She’s home,” he said.
“She’s with her mother. She asked me to find you.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s alive,” he said. “That’s your doing.”
He opened the sheet against my door.
My cab number, in blue pen, written over and over down the margin, like she’d been scared she would lose it.
“The police have her statement,” he said.
He didn’t look away from me.
“When’s the last time you talked to your son, Mrs. Dunne?”
He turned the sheet over.
Two words in capitals, pressed so hard the pen went through.
ISRAEL’S MOTHER.
The open window
“Your son was driving the SUV,” Rashid said.
“She wants to know whether you told him where she was.”
“No.”
I took my phone from my pocket and opened Israel’s messages.
I held it through the window.
“Those came while she was with me. I didn’t answer.”
Rashid read them without taking the phone.
Curtis put his hand on the door above my head.
“Was she seeing him?” I said.
“Yes.”
My thumb slipped against the screen.
It brought up the keyboard, ready for me to tell my son something useful.
I closed it.
“She saw his picture and thought I’d called him?”
“She thought you might be taking her back.”
For three mornings I’d pictured her bare feet at that bus shelter.
I’d been angry with myself for letting her out.
Now her father stood beside the car, and I couldn’t offer him so much as the right sentence.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“That’s what she needs to hear from you.”
I reached behind my seat and brought out the sandal.
I’d tucked it under a rag so fares wouldn’t step on it.
Rashid held it by the strap.
“Would she come to my house?” I said.
“With you. Daylight. Nobody else unless she wants them.”
He didn’t say yes.
Fair enough. His daughter had climbed into one Dunne’s car to escape another Dunne’s car.
We weren’t a family you booked twice without checking.
“Ask her,” I said. “Please.”
He folded the sheet along its creases.
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll call first.”
“And Rashid?”
He stopped beside the hood.
“Does he know she’s home?”
“He knows she’s with us. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
Curtis waited until Rashid reached his car before he bent toward me.
“Why’s Israel asking where you are at four in the morning?”
I put my phone away.
“He could see whose cab she got into.”
Curtis’s coffee
Curtis picked up his coffee that Sunday afternoon, then set it down without drinking.
“Israel told me you canceled the operation.”
I turned in the seat. My knee objected before I could.
“He told you WHAT?”
“Said you weren’t ready. Said you liked getting out at night.”
There I was, sixty-three years old, apparently out cruising for pleasure with a brace cutting a trench behind my knee.
“Does this look like a hobby?”
Curtis rubbed his mouth.
“He asked about using the lot Wednesday. The food truck’s being sold. A woman named Trang is buying it.”
“He found a truck, then.”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“No.”
That was an answer I hated giving. I could hear how it sounded.
Six months earlier, at my kitchen counter, Israel had held my phone while I moved the money.
He kept pointing at the wrong place on the screen.
“I can read,” I’d said.
“I know, Mom. I’m excited.”
“January is my knee. Before that, every dollar comes back.”
“Six months,” he’d said.
“I’ll put it in a text so you can frame it.”
He sent the message while he was still standing beside me.
I’d saved it.
Now Curtis pulled out his own phone.
“Trang called me about space for the handover. Ayanna’s name’s on it too. Both of them have to be there.”
Ayanna.
The girl in my back seat had been the partner.
Not some man Israel knew from somewhere, which was the entire amount of detail he’d supplied.
“Did you tell him he could use the lot?”
“Before today, yes.”
“Keep it that way.”
Curtis lowered his phone.
“You need to ask him about Thursday.”
“I need to hear her first.”
He nodded, but his eyes went toward the visor picture.
Everybody who knew Israel had that nineteen-year-old somewhere in their head.
Mine had been riding six inches above my nose.
“I can be there when you talk to him,” Curtis said.
I wanted that. Twenty-two years across the street meant somebody else remembered the boy who shoveled my walk without being asked.
It also meant somebody else might believe the man was still that boy.
“I’ll ask him over at noon tomorrow,” I said. “After she’s gone.”
Curtis stood back so I could get out.
I used the door and his arm, angry at both for being necessary.
I sent the text, and my phone lit up before I reached his office.
Israel had answered my request to talk.
“Great. We can get your surgery money sorted.”
Ten o’clock Monday
Ayanna came with her father at ten on Monday morning.
She wore shoes. I had to stop myself from looking at them.
Rashid took the chair nearest the kitchen door.
Ayanna stayed standing until I sat down, then chose the chair opposite mine.
I pushed my phone across the table.
“Those are his messages. You can see I didn’t answer.”
She read them. Her finger rested beside the words Need you.
“Did he call?”
“Not that night.”
“Since?”
“I asked him to come at noon today. You won’t be here.”
Her hand came off the phone.
“I should’ve told your father when he called,” I said.
“I’m telling you now. He doesn’t know you’re here.”
Rashid checked the clock over my stove.
“Then we won’t stay long.”
Ayanna kept her coat on.
I wanted to take it, make tea, do some ordinary kitchen thing that would turn me into a woman she could trust.
The kettle would’ve had a better chance than I did.
“You don’t owe me the whole story,” I said.
“But I need to know what happened before you opened my door.”
She looked at her father. He kept his hands on his knees.
“We were at the pancake place. Talking about selling the truck.”
“The truck you own with him?”
“Half each.”
“All right.”
“He wanted me to sign something. I wouldn’t. He took my keys off the table.”
“Your car keys?”
“Everything. My car, my apartment. He said we’d finish talking in his car.”
Her father shifted his chair back.
Ayanna put a hand toward him without looking away from me.
“I went because I wanted my keys. Then he wouldn’t unlock the doors.”
I pressed my foot against the floor. Hard.
As if I could stop something that had happened four days before.
“At the side lot, he got out to come around. I hit the unlock button. I ran. My sandals came off.”
“And he followed you.”
“Yes.”
She didn’t decorate it for me. She shouldn’t have had to.
“I told the police about the doors,” she said.
“About him taking my keys. He says I got out because we were arguing and he followed to make sure I got home.”
Rashid’s hand covered his daughter’s for a moment.
“Did you see his face?” she said.
“In the SUV? No.”
She nodded.
“But I saw the car stay behind us. I heard what you said. I’ll tell them that.”
Her eyes filled. She rubbed under one with her sleeve.
“I didn’t know whether you’d say I was making it up.”
“I drove you for three hours, honey. I wasn’t giving you a tour of places with fluorescent lighting.”
She almost smiled.
I wanted to keep that almost.
I wanted another minute before my son became the man who locked this girl inside his car.
“He told me you’d agreed,” she said.
“Agreed to what?”
“About the money. What was supposed to happen when—”
The back door opened.
Israel stepped into my kitchen carrying the smile he used when he wanted somebody to stop being difficult.
“Good,” he said. “Everybody’s here.”
The chair opposite mine
It was ten-thirty Monday morning. I’d told him noon.
“Outside,” I said.
Israel kept one hand on the door.
“Mom, we need to stop doing this in separate conversations.”
Rashid stood. Ayanna’s chair scraped against the floor.
“She agreed to see me,” I said. “Not you.”
“I can see that. And I’m glad. Really. She needed to hear you were fine.”
Fine.
My knee was swelling inside my jeans, and his girlfriend had just described using a car’s unlock button to get away from him.
He could’ve sold weather reports during a tornado.
Curtis came through the gate behind him.
“I saw his car,” he said to me.
Israel stepped aside to let Curtis in.
That made it look like he was welcoming a guest to his own house.
Ayanna moved beside her father.
“I didn’t ask him here now,” I said.
“But you called him,” she said.
“At noon.”
Israel put both palms on the table.
“Look, the truck’s sold. Wednesday we finish it. Mom gets her money. Ayanna gets to move on. That’s what everybody wants.”
“You took her keys,” I said.
“We were arguing.”
“You took her keys.”
“She was about to drive upset. I thought we’d sit and talk. Apparently that makes me a criminal now.”
Rashid took a step toward the table.
“Give her the keys.”
“I gave them back Friday.”
“You dropped them through our mail slot,” Rashid said. “You didn’t knock.”
Israel looked at Curtis.
“Because I was told to stay away. I did what they asked. Now that’s wrong too.”
Curtis didn’t answer.
I knew that look on Israel’s face.
He used to bring home a bad report from school and begin with the teacher’s tone of voice.
At thirty-six, he could still spend ten minutes on how unfairly somebody had handed him the bill.
“What was she supposed to sign?” I said.
“Directions for the sale money. That’s all. She’s holding the whole thing up.”
Ayanna reached into her coat.
“You want me to show her?”
“Sure. Show her. Then tell her why you won’t let her get her knee fixed.”
Her hand stopped.
“Don’t put that on me.”
“Then sign.”
Curtis pulled out the chair beside mine.
“Could we sit down? Get the money straight first?”
“I don’t want to sit with him,” Ayanna said.
“Nobody’s asking you to stay with him,” Israel said.
“We’re asking you to finish business.”
He turned to me.
“Mom, tell her. I owe you forty-one thousand dollars. I’ve never denied that.”
He’d stopped answering my calls. He’d closed his apartment door in my face.
But there he stood, announcing my money like he’d brought it wrapped in a ribbon.
“Then pay it,” I said.
“I will. She has to sign.”
Ayanna took a folded page from her pocket.
“Your money would come out of—”
“Can you just let him pay me?”
I said it.
My mouth got there before the rest of me.
The January appointment, the nights in that dipped seat, the stairs I took sideways.
All of it came out at a girl who’d come to my house because she was trying to trust me.
She put the page away.
Rashid picked up her bag.
“Come on.”
“Wait,” I said. “That came out wrong.”
Israel reached toward Ayanna’s sleeve. Rashid stepped between them.
“Move your hand.”
Israel lifted both hands.
“Nobody’s touching anybody.”
Ayanna looked at me.
“He said you’d do that.”
I tried to stand.
My knee folded enough to put me back in the chair.
Curtis reached for my elbow. I shook him off.
“Ayanna. Please.”
She was crying now.
She wiped her face with both hands, angry at the tears.
“I wanted you to read it.”
“I will.”
“You asked me to sign it.”
She went through the back door with her father.
Israel pulled her empty chair closer to the table.
I couldn’t get up fast enough to go after her.
The sentence on his phone
Israel sat in Ayanna’s chair that Monday morning.
“Well,” he said. “That could’ve gone better.”
I wanted to throw something. Unfortunately, everything within reach belonged to me.
Curtis shut the back door.
“Let me see the paper,” I said.
“I don’t have her copy.”
“Then show me yours.”
“It’s on my phone. But first we need to clear up Thursday. Because this is getting serious.”
“It was serious when she couldn’t get out of your car.”
“Mom, you weren’t there.”
“I was there for the next three hours.”
He rubbed his forehead, then held his phone toward me.
“Just read this. It’s what happened from your point of view. You don’t need to say anything about the restaurant.”
The message began with my name.
He’d written it as if I had written it.
I read the first sentence twice.
Ayanna did not appear afraid of Israel and asked me to drive around while she calmed down.
Below it, he’d written that no vehicle followed us.
Curtis leaned over my shoulder.
“You can’t send that,” he said.
“She can change the wording,” Israel said. “I’m trying to make it easier.”
“You’re trying to make it false.”
Israel took the phone back.
“She didn’t see who was driving. You didn’t, Mom. You just said so.”
“I saw the SUV.”
“Lots of people own gray SUVs.”
“For twenty minutes?”
“You were on main roads. So was everybody else.”
He turned the phone flat on the table.
“Ayanna’s father is making this worse. They want somebody to blame because the relationship didn’t work. I get that. But now she’s saying I frightened her, and you’ve got the one account that can clear it up.”
I kept seeing her thumb pressed against the edge of her phone.
“She asked me not to stop.”
“People say things when they’re upset.”
“She cried.”
“She’s been crying all week.”
Curtis moved away from the table.
Israel followed him with his eyes, then leaned toward me.
“You know me.”
I did. I knew which cereal he’d eaten dry out of the box.
I knew the scar under his chin came from falling off a porch step.
I could’ve supplied the entire history of his lunch preferences.
None of it put me inside that SUV.
“Send the sale paper to my phone,” I said.
“Can we deal with one thing at a time?”
“We are.”
He pulled his chair closer.
“Mom. The money can be yours Wednesday. You can stop driving. Get the operation. I’ll take you myself.”
For a second I let him put me in that car.
He would carry my bag. He would complain about the parking.
I’d complain that he was driving too fast, and we’d sound like ourselves again.
I hated how much I wanted it.
“What do I have to do?” I said.
Curtis turned back.
Israel unlocked his phone.
“Just say she wasn’t scared of me. You didn’t know who she meant. That’s true.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
His hand stopped above the screen.
“You said you didn’t know it was me.”
“I didn’t. She did.”
He stood so quickly the chair hit the cabinet.
“Fine. Tell them whatever you want. But don’t call me crying when this blows up the sale.”
“Send the paper.”
“No. You can get it from your new friend.”
Curtis opened the door.
Israel looked at him.
“Really? In my mother’s house?”
“She asked you to leave earlier. You should’ve listened.”
Israel stayed beside the table.
“I’ve got nothing left if you do this, Mom.”
I looked at the phone in his hand.
“You’ve got my forty-one thousand.”
He pushed the chair out of his way.
“You choose them, then. When it’s time for the operation, call them.”
The door closed behind him.
I sat there until Curtis moved Ayanna’s chair away from the cabinet.
One leg had left a mark in the paint.
“Give me a minute,” I said. “Then I’ll get ready for work.”
“No.”
“I need the shift.”
“You couldn’t stand up.”
“I can drive.”
“Not safely tonight.”
He put his hand over the cab keys on my counter.
I cried then. I wish I could say it was for Ayanna, or for the son I’d raised.
Some of it was because I couldn’t even earn my way out of the hole he’d put me in.
Curtis sat down.
“I’ll call her father,” he said.
“I’ll call him.”
I picked up my phone.
The cab keys stayed in Curtis’s hand.
Ayanna’s page
At four on Monday afternoon, Ayanna and Rashid came back.
This time I met them at the front door with my cane.
“I asked you to sign something I hadn’t read,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Ayanna held her bag against her coat.
“Did he ask you to say I lied?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I told him no. Then I called the police number your father gave me. They’re taking my account tomorrow.”
She looked at Rashid. He nodded.
“I told them I’d keep the messages,” I said.
She came inside.
At the kitchen table, she unfolded the page she’d tried to show me that morning.
The truck was selling for $82,000. There was no loan left on it.
Half belonged to her. Half belonged to Israel.
His directions sent the whole amount to him.
Below that, he’d written that he would repay me.
“And your half?” I said.
“He said we’d work it out later.”
She took a pen from her bag and drew a line through his directions.
“This is what I offered Thursday.”
She wrote her name beside one half.
Beside the other, she wrote mine.
“He keeps saying I won’t let him pay you. I said he could pay you directly. With his money.”
All $41,000.
His half.
He wanted to hand me my knee money with one hand and take her entire share with the other.
I pushed the page away before my tears hit it.
“He said you knew,” she said.
“That you wanted it done his way because you didn’t trust me.”
“Why would I trust you less than him? I hadn’t even met you.”
“He said you wouldn’t meet me.”
I covered my mouth.
“He told me what cab you drove,” she said.
“After I got away. In a message. Said I hadn’t got very far.”
She slid her phone across the table.
There it was.
238. My mother’s cab. Think about that.
“Then I saw the picture,” she said.
I reached across the table. This time she let me take her hand.
“I’m still selling my half Wednesday,” she said.
“But I’m not buying your money back from him.”
“You won’t.”
I took out my own phone and opened the message Israel had sent six months earlier.
Then I called Curtis about Wednesday.
Wednesday at the lot
At eleven on Wednesday morning, Israel came into Curtis’s office and stopped when he saw us.
Ayanna sat beside Rashid.
I had the chair by the door, where I could stretch my leg.
Trang stood at Curtis’s desk with the sale papers.
She’d come to buy a food truck, not attend the worst family gathering in the county.
I couldn’t blame her for keeping her coat on.
“What’s this?” Israel said.
“Your sale,” Curtis said.
Israel looked at me.
“I thought you weren’t working.”
“I’m not.”
On Tuesday I’d given my account of the ride.
I hadn’t supplied a face I couldn’t see.
I’d supplied the red lights, the car behind us, and every word I could remember Ayanna saying.
Israel knew. He’d sent me one message afterward.
Hope it was worth it.
Now he pulled out his phone.
“Can we get this finished? Trang’s got a business to run.”
Trang put one finger on the page.
“You both own it. You both sign. I need payment directions you both agree to.”
“I sent those.”
“Ayanna didn’t agree.”
He looked at her.
“We’ve been through this.”
“Yes,” she said.
“The money goes into the account, I pay my mother, and we settle the rest.”
“No.”
He spread his hands toward Trang.
“This is what I’ve been dealing with. We have a buyer. We have a price. My mother needs an operation, and we’re sitting here arguing about where to send money.”
I put my phone on the desk. His six-month promise filled the screen.
“You borrowed it from me,” I said.
“I KNOW.”
Trang looked up.
Israel lowered his hands.
“I know, Mom. Nobody’s disputing that.”
“Then it comes from your half.”
He stared at me.
“That’s my entire half.”
“Yes.”
“I worked on that truck too. I put time into it.”
Ayanna kept both hands in her lap.
“So did I.”
“You’ll get yours.”
“Mine goes to me.”
Israel turned away, took two steps, then came back.
“Okay. Let me understand. I put my money into a business, we sell the business, and I’m supposed to walk out with nothing?”
“My money,” I said.
“Money you lent me.”
“Yes.”
Rashid pulled Ayanna’s page closer to the edge of the desk.
“She offered you this Thursday.”
Israel pointed at him.
“You weren’t there either.”
“My daughter was.”
“Your daughter left in the middle of a conversation.”
Ayanna stood.
“You locked the car.”
“I was coming around to your side.”
“You took my keys.”
“I returned them.”
“You followed the cab.”
He looked at me.
“Mom didn’t see who it was.”
I stood too. Curtis put a hand near my elbow, but I stayed up.
“Then why did you tell her it was my cab?”
Israel’s mouth opened.
I put Ayanna’s phone beside mine.
His message was still there.
He reached toward it. Rashid moved it back.
“She needed to know she wasn’t with a stranger,” Israel said.
Ayanna made a sound that hurt more than shouting.
“You sent that while I was hiding from you.”
“I was trying to reassure you.”
“You told me to think about it.”
He looked toward the office window.
Curtis stood beside the desk. He didn’t offer Israel anywhere else to look.
“Tell your mother what you were going to do with my half,” Ayanna said.
“We were going to settle things.”
“After you paid her.”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
He rubbed both hands over his face.
“I can’t do this with all of you taking turns.”
Trang closed her folder.
“I can leave. But I won’t send money under directions one owner hasn’t accepted.”
Israel put his hand on the folder.
“Wait.”
Nobody moved.
He turned to me.
“If I send you the whole forty-one, you can tell them we’ve sorted it out.”
“I’ll tell them you repaid me.”
“And that you misunderstood the rest.”
“No.”
“Mom.”
“You don’t get to buy my account of Thursday.”
He dropped his hand from the folder.
“I’m trying to fix this.”
“Then pay your debt,” Curtis said.
Israel’s eyes filled. He wiped them with the heel of his hand and looked angry that anybody had seen.
For a moment I wanted to cross the room.
My knee kept me where I belonged.
“Fine,” he said. “Put it in her name. All of my half. You can all stand here and see me do the right thing.”
Ayanna sat down. Rashid put his arm around her chair.
Trang opened the folder again.
Israel took the pen.
Before he signed, he looked at Ayanna.
“You know I’m leaving here with nothing.”
She pulled the page toward herself and signed her line.
“You knew I would be.”
Forty-one thousand dollars
Trang sent the first payment while we were still in Curtis’s office that Wednesday.
She turned her phone so Israel could check the amount and the name.
My name.
$41,000.00.
“That’s all of my share,” he said.
“Yes,” Trang said.
She waited for me to check my account.
I typed the password wrong. My hands wouldn’t behave.
I wanted to tell everybody that I knew perfectly well how to use a phone, which would’ve made me sound about a hundred and twelve.
Curtis looked out the window until I got it open.
The money was there.
The nineteen dollars were still there too.
I sat down and covered my face.
Nobody asked me whether I was all right. I was grateful for that.
I’d have had to pick one answer out of too many.
Trang sent Ayanna her $41,000.00 next.
Ayanna checked it, then pushed her phone into her bag and bent over her knees.
Rashid put his hand on her back.
Israel stood beside the desk.
“So we’re done.”
Trang took the truck keys.
“I have what I need.”
Curtis held out his hand.
“The gate key too.”
Israel pulled it off his ring.
“I might need somewhere to park while I get sorted.”
“Not here,” Curtis said.
He took the key and put it in his pocket.
Israel looked at me, but I was getting out of the chair.
Outside, Ayanna stopped beside 238.
“I thought you were taking me back to him,” she said.
“I know.”
“I was trying to decide whether I could get out at a red light.”
My cane slipped against the gravel. I planted it again.
“Oh, honey.”
She came toward me and put her arms around me carefully, as if my knee extended all the way to my shoulders.
I held her harder.
Rashid stood a few feet away with his hands in his jacket pockets.
When she stepped back, he wiped his face and pretended his nose needed attention.
“I’ll take you in January,” Curtis said from behind us.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know where the hospital is. You’ve driven around it enough.”
I laughed with my face still wet.
Ayanna squeezed my hand.
“Let somebody drive you.”
“I intend to.”
Trang climbed into the food truck.
Israel stood outside the office while she checked the mirrors, started the engine, and pulled through the gate.
His truck left without him.
His share was in my account. Ayanna’s share was in hers.
Curtis had his gate key back.
I opened the cab door and unclipped the photograph from the visor.
Israel at nineteen still had that fish.
I put the picture in my bag.
I could keep a photograph without letting the man in it tell me what I’d seen.
Then I shut the cab door.
“Keep the sandal?” he said.
“Ayanna’s got it.”
“Good.”
Rashid went to bring his car around.
He was taking me home before he took his daughter home.
Israel crossed the gravel while I waited.
“Mom.”
I held my cane against my leg.
“You got the money,” he said.
“Ayanna got hers. Can’t you tell them you aren’t sure about the SUV?”
“I am sure.”
“You didn’t see me driving.”
“I’ll tell them that too.”
His eyes went toward Rashid’s car.
“Please. You don’t have to tell them every little part.”
“They get the whole ride.”
I walked past him with my money back in my account.
If this one stayed with you, send it to someone who has had to tell the truth about a person they love.
For more stories about family members making shocking choices on your behalf, read “My Father Put My Car Keys Beside His Form” and “My Husband Offered His Twin My Side Of The Garage”. And when family drama spills into a big celebration, “My Father Moved My Place Card Beside the Kitchen Door” is another gripping read.
