My Son-In-Law Borrowed My Late Husband’s Truck “For A Couple Of Weeks.” Eight Months Later, My Husband’s Best Friend Found It For Sale Online, So I Went To Meet The Buyer With The Title

Every Sunday morning I drive my late husband’s truck to church.

It’s a white 1997 pickup with 312,000 miles on it, a dented tailgate, a passenger door that only opens from the outside, and an ashtray full of Juicy Fruit wrappers, because Otis quit smoking in 1988 and replaced it with gum and never looked back. The bench seat has a split in it that he patched with gray duct tape. The cab still smells like pipe dope and spearmint, which I know is a strange thing to love, but I do.

I’m not a truck person. I’m sixty-nine, I ran a school cafeteria in Puyallup for twenty-six years, and I own a perfectly nice little silver sedan that gets thirty-four miles to the gallon. But a truck that sits dies. Otis taught me that. The battery goes, the tires flat-spot, mice move into the air filter. So every Sunday I climb up into that cab, pump the gas twice like he showed me, and drive four miles to Saint Ann’s and four miles back.

Otis was a plumber for forty-one years. One-man shop. Muncy Plumbing. He fixed half the water heaters in this town and probably flushed a few of the toilets himself to make sure they worked. He died two years ago this past March, at his workbench in the garage, sharpening a hacksaw. His heart. The doctor said he wouldn’t have felt much. I’ve chosen to believe that.

His tools were still in the truck. The big steel box bolted across the bed held his pipe wrenches, the long ones with “O.M.” scratched into the handles with a nail, his torch, his flaring kit, and his pipe threader, which is a heavy, ugly, expensive thing he bought used in 1992 and treated like a family pet.

I didn’t know what to do with any of it. So I left it all just the way it was.

Polly and Mitch

My daughter Polly is forty-one. She’s a receptionist at a dental office, and she’s the most organized person I know, and she married a man who is not.

Mitch Reardon is forty-six. I want to be fair to him, so I’ll say it plainly: he’s not a bad man. He’s good with my grandson, Rory. He shows up for Thanksgiving. He fixed my garbage disposal once and didn’t make a big thing of it. But Mitch has always had a plan, and the plan has always been about to work.

Two years ago he got laid off from the warehouse where he’d driven a forklift for eleven years. He took it hard. Then he decided he’d go out on his own. He printed up cards that said REARDON REMODELING and bought a used ladder off a neighbor. He was going to do bathrooms and decks.

In February he came over for Sunday dinner, and over the pot roast he said, “Rosetta, I wanted to ask you something.”

I knew what it was before he asked. He’d been looking at the truck through my kitchen window for an hour.

A Couple of Weeks

“I’ve got a bathroom job in Sumner,” he said. “Full gut. Tub, toilet, vanity. I can’t haul a tub in my Camry. And the guy needs the supply lines redone, and I don’t own a threader.” He smiled. “Otis had everything.”

“He did,” I said.

“Just a couple of weeks,” he said. “I’ll bring it back with a full tank. I’ll even wash it.”

I hesitated, and Polly, who was clearing plates, said, “Mom. It’s just sitting there.”

That sentence went through me. It wasn’t just sitting there. I drove it on Sundays. I sat in it sometimes in the garage, with the door open, not going anywhere. But I couldn’t say that out loud at my own dining table without sounding like a widow in a movie.

“It’s insured on my policy,” I said. “It’s still in Otis’s name and mine. You’d have to be careful.”

“Of course,” Mitch said. “Rosetta, I’ll treat it like it’s mine.”

I should have heard that sentence better than I did.

I gave him the key off the hook by the garage door. I kept the spare on my own ring, the one with the little brass fish Otis bought me at the coast in 1979. Mitch drove away that night with the tailgate rattling, and Rory waved at me from the passenger seat.

Weeks Into Months

The bathroom in Sumner took longer than expected. Then there was a deck in Edgewood. Then the truck needed brakes, which Mitch said he would “handle.” Then it was May, and I asked Polly about it on the phone, and she said, “Mom, he’s working. Do you want him to lose the work?”

I didn’t. I really didn’t.

In June I drove past their house and saw the truck in the driveway with a big magnetic sign stuck on the driver’s door: REARDON REMODELING, and a phone number. Otis’s door. I sat at the stop sign longer than I should have. Then I drove home and told myself I was being sentimental.

In July Rory came over to mow my lawn, and while I was making him a grilled cheese, he said, “Dad says I’m getting Grandpa’s truck when I get my license.”

I put the spatula down. “Did he?”

“Yeah. He said it’s basically his now anyway.” Rory looked at my face and went red. He’s sixteen, but he’s a sweet sixteen. “Grandma, was I not supposed to say that?”

“You can always say things to me,” I told him, and flipped the sandwich.

That night I called Mitch and asked when I might have the truck back. He said, “Soon as this deck’s done. Week or two.” I said that was fine. I did not say that it had been five months. I did not say anything about the sign on the door. I’m sixty-nine, and I was raised not to make a fuss over things, and I’ve learned since that this is how a lot of things get taken from women my age. Politely. One week or two at a time.

Orville Calls

Orville Pitts was Otis’s best friend for fifty years. They fished together every Thursday from the day they met in a union hall until the Thursday before Otis died. Orville is seventy-four and still drives his own boat to the lake, and he calls me every couple of weeks, partly because he promised Otis he would and partly, I think, because he’s lonely too.

He called me on a Tuesday night in October. He didn’t say hello.

“Rosetta,” he said. “Why is Otis’s truck for sale on Marketplace?”

I sat down on the arm of the couch.

“It’s not,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “My grandson showed me. I’m looking at it on his phone right now. White ’97, dented tailgate, toolbox across the bed. And honey, one of the pictures is the wrenches. I can see the O.M. on the handle. I watched him scratch that in with a sixteen-penny nail.”

He read me the listing. I’ll never forget it. “1997 pickup plus full plumbing tool set. Runs great, high miles. Contractor downsizing. $9,500 OBO. Serious buyers only.”

Contractor downsizing.

Serious Buyers Only

“Who’s selling it?” I asked.

“Account just says Mitch R.,” Orville said. “Listed three days ago.”

I asked him to send me the pictures. He didn’t know how, so his grandson did. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at them one by one on my phone. The truck in their driveway. The sign was off the door for the photos. The duct tape on the seat. The ashtray, emptied. The big steel toolbox open, the pipe wrenches laid out on a moving blanket, the torch, the flaring kit. The threader wasn’t in any of the pictures.

There was even a photo of the odometer. 312,446. He’d put almost five hundred miles on it.

“What do you want me to do?” Orville asked.

I thought about calling Mitch. I thought about calling Polly. I could already hear both of those calls. Mitch would say it was a misunderstanding, that he’d been “just seeing what it’s worth,” and then the listing would come down and go back up a month later under a different name. Polly would say, “Mom, he’s under a lot of pressure.” And she would be right, probably, and it wouldn’t matter.

“Can you message him?” I said. “Like you want to buy it. Just ask him when he’s showing it.”

Orville was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, one short laugh, the way Otis used to.

“Otis would’ve done the same thing,” he said.

Saturday at Ten

Mitch answered Orville’s message within ten minutes. Orville read it to me over the phone in his slow, careful voice.

“Got a guy coming Saturday at 10 to look at it. Meeting him at the grocery store lot on Meridian. If he flakes, it’s yours. Price is firm-ish.”

Saturday at ten.

I didn’t sleep much that week. I went to the filing cabinet in Otis’s old office and found the title, the actual paper one, in the folder marked TRUCK in his blocky handwriting. Registered owners: Otis A. Muncy and Rosetta L. Muncy. I’d never transferred anything after he died. There hadn’t been any reason to. It was our truck. I put it in a manila envelope.

Saturday morning I put on my good jeans and my denim jacket, the one Polly says makes me look like a country singer, and my gold hoops. I don’t know why the hoops. I think I wanted to look like someone who wasn’t going to be talked over. I put my key ring in my jacket pocket, the one with the brass fish and the spare key to the truck.

Orville picked me up at nine-thirty. He didn’t say much on the drive. At a red light, he patted my hand twice and said, “You want me to do the talking?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll do the talking. You just stand there and look like a friend of Otis’s.”

“I am a friend of Otis’s.”

“That’s why it’ll work.”

The Lot on Meridian

It was gray and drizzly, the way October always is here, and the lot was half full. I saw the truck right away, parked at the far end near the cart return, nose toward the trees. White. Dented tailgate. My heart did something it hasn’t done since the morning I found Otis in the garage.

The hood was up. Mitch was standing at the front fender in a work jacket, pointing into the engine. Next to him was a man in his late fifties, broad, with a gray mustache, leaning in to look. They were laughing about something.

Orville parked three rows away. I got out with my envelope.

I don’t remember walking across that lot. I remember the sound of my boots on the wet asphalt, and I remember Mitch looking up and seeing me, and his whole face going still.

“Rosetta?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

The other man straightened up and wiped his hands on a rag.

I didn’t answer Mitch. I walked right up to the front of the truck, opened the manila envelope, took out the title, and laid it flat on the hood.

“Good morning,” I said to the stranger. “Before you hand him any money, you should read whose name is on this.”

Whose Name

The man looked at me, then at Mitch, then at the paper. He leaned over it, the way you lean over a menu without your glasses.

His name, I learned later, was Nestor Quiroga. He was fifty-eight, a plumber out of Tacoma, and he was buying a work truck for his nephew, who had just finished his apprenticeship. He had six thousand dollars in cash in his jacket, Mitch’s price having apparently come down.

“Otis A. Muncy,” he read slowly. “Rosetta L. Muncy.” He looked up. “Ma’am, are you Rosetta?”

“I am.”

“And Otis?”

“Was my husband. He passed. Those are his wrenches in the box. You’ll see his initials on the handles.”

Mitch had both hands up a little, like I’d pulled a gun. “Okay, okay. This is a misunderstanding. Polly said it was fine.”

“Polly doesn’t own it either,” I said.

Mitch looked past me. “Orv,” he said. “Come on. Tell her.” I hadn’t even heard Orville walk up behind me. He didn’t move. “Don’t look at me, son,” he said. “I was standing in that garage when Otis scratched his initials in those handles.”

“It was just sitting there,” he said. “Rosetta, it was just sitting there for two years. Things that sit, they rot. I was going to give you some of it.”

“Some of it,” I said.

I said it quietly. I didn’t have to say anything more. Mitch heard it the way I heard it.

Nestor folded his rag. He looked at the title on the hood, and at the O.M. on the wrench handle, and then at Mitch, for what felt like a long time.

Nestor

“Man,” Nestor said to Mitch, not loudly. “You can’t sell me a truck you don’t own.”

Mitch started to say something about how the paperwork could be “sorted out later,” and Nestor just shook his head.

“No,” he said. “My dad was a plumber. Forty years. When he died, my uncle tried to sell his van out from under my mother. I was nineteen. I remember her standing in the driveway.” He turned to me. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. Your husband kept this thing up. You can tell.”

“Thank you,” I said. “He did.”

He shook my hand. Then he shook Orville’s. He did not shake Mitch’s. He walked back to his own truck and drove off, and I watched him pull out onto Meridian with his six thousand dollars still in his jacket.

The three of us stood in the drizzle.

The Key

“Rosetta,” Mitch said. “Please. Let me explain.”

“You can,” I said. “But not right now.”

I held out my hand. He looked at it. I didn’t move it.

He put the key in my palm. The original one, from the hook by my garage door. I put it on my ring next to the spare, next to the brass fish.

I took the title off the hood, put it back in the envelope and closed the hood myself. It took two tries. Otis always did it with one hand. I folded the moving blanket in the back and closed the lid on the toolbox, and I climbed up into the cab and pumped the gas twice.

It smelled like Mitch’s coffee and some kind of air freshener, the pine-tree kind. Underneath, very faint, I could still smell spearmint.

Orville drove my sedan home behind me. Mitch stood in the lot. When I looked in the side mirror at the stop light, he was still standing there with his hands in his jacket pockets.

The Inventory

At home I backed the truck into the garage, the way Otis always did, so it would be facing out.

Then I took everything out of the toolbox and laid it on the workbench and went through it against the list in my head. Pipe wrenches, all six. Torch. Flaring kit. Basin wrench. The big tubing cutter. The crimper.

The pipe threader was gone.

Orville stood at the end of the bench and looked at the empty space where it should have been. “That was a Ridgid,” he said. “Otis paid twelve hundred dollars for that in 1992. Used.” He shook his head. “He sold it already.”

I sat down on Otis’s stool. It’s the stool he died on, and I’d never sat on it before. I don’t know why I did then.

Polly

Polly came over at seven that night. Alone. She stood in my kitchen in her coat, and she didn’t take it off, and I knew from her face that she’d been crying in the car.

“Mom,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

I believed her. Polly has never been able to lie to me. She gets blotchy on her neck. Her neck was fine. Her eyes were the problem.

“He told me he was ‘seeing what it was worth,'” she said. “For insurance. He told me that in September. I didn’t ask any more. I didn’t want to know.” She sat down at the table. “We’re behind on the mortgage, Mom. Two months. He hasn’t had real work since the deck in August. The Sumner guy never finished paying him. He sold Dad’s threader in September for four hundred dollars to make the car payment.”

I made tea, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

“Because you’d help,” she said. “And then Mitch would have to know that you helped. And he’d rather do anything than that.” She laughed, the awful kind of laugh. “Including, apparently, this.”

What I Said

I’m not going to pretend I said anything wise. I’m not wise. I ran a cafeteria. Mostly what I know is how to feed four hundred children in twenty-two minutes and how to tell when a pot of chili is about to burn.

What I said was this. “Polly, I’ll help you with the mortgage. One payment. As a loan. We’ll write it down and both sign it, and you’ll pay me back when you can, and I won’t ask about it at Thanksgiving.”

She nodded and cried.

“But you need to hear this part too,” I said. “Next time you two need help, you ask me for help. Don’t ask me for the truck. And don’t ever tell me something of your father’s is just sitting there.”

She looked up.

“It isn’t just sitting there,” I said. “I drive it to church. I sit in it. I smell his gum. It’s sitting there the way I’m sitting here.”

My daughter came around the table and put her arms around me, still in her coat, and we stayed like that for a while.

The Threader

Mitch didn’t come to Sunday dinner for three weeks. I didn’t push. Polly told me he was “ashamed,” which I thought was a good start.

Then, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my doorbell rang. Mitch was on the porch holding something wrapped in a moving blanket, and it was heavy enough that he was holding it against his chest with both arms.

It was the threader.

He’d found the man he sold it to, a guy in Fife who did irrigation, and bought it back. The man had wanted four-fifty, fifty more than he’d paid, and Mitch had paid it. He’d cleaned it, too. Oiled it. You could see where he’d scrubbed the old pipe dope out of the die heads with a wire brush.

“I’m sorry, Rosetta,” he said. He was looking at the threader, not at me. “I don’t have a good reason. I had a bunch of bad ones.”

“Put it in the box,” I said. “Bottom left. He kept it on the left.”

He carried it out to the garage and put it in the toolbox, bottom left. Then he stood by the truck for a minute and put his hand on the dented tailgate. I didn’t ask what he was thinking. I think it was the closest Mitch has ever come to talking to Otis.

He came to Thanksgiving. He brought the rolls. He didn’t say much. Neither did I. That’s how a lot of families fix things, slowly and without much talking. We’ll see.

Rory Drives

On Sunday afternoons now, after church, I take Rory to the empty church lot in the truck and teach him to drive it.

He’s terrible. He stalls it on the hill by the rectory every single time. He grinds the gears and winces like it hurt him personally. He keeps reaching for a cup holder that doesn’t exist.

Last Sunday, he got it all the way around the lot twice without stalling, and he pulled up under the big maple and put it in neutral and set the brake, and he sat there with his hands at ten and two, grinning.

“Grandma,” he said. “Can I have a piece of gum?”

I opened the ashtray. I still keep Juicy Fruit in there. I don’t even like it. I gave him a stick, and took one for myself, and we sat with the windows down chewing gum in a dead man’s truck, which is a sentence that should be sad, but it wasn’t.

The truck isn’t Rory’s. It isn’t Mitch’s. When the time comes, we’ll talk about it as a family, with the title on the table, and everybody will be in the room.

For now it’s mine. I drive it on Sundays. It’s not just sitting there.

If someone you love has been told your things are “just sitting there,” maybe share this with them. And if you’re a widow keeping something running for someone who’s gone, tell us below what it is.

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