He Said “Sundays. Sometimes.” and I Heard My Son’s Voice on That Dark Road

It’s 2:10 a.m. and I’m still in my coat. The kitchen light buzzes the way it has since August, and there’s a bag of frozen peas on the counter I bought at the gas station and never put in the freezer. It’s just green water now. I can’t throw it away yet.

My Buick died on Route 51 a little after eight. Just quit, right by the old feed store, hazards blinking like they were embarrassed for me. Phone at 4 percent, screen cracked since spring when I dropped it in the church parking lot. I called the number on the roadside card my sister Paulette taped in my glovebox years ago, and then I sat there listening to the engine tick.

The truck comes forty minutes later. The driver is young, maybe thirty, dreadlocks pulled back, red T-shirt with a grease stain on the shoulder. He’s wearing those knit work gloves with the rubber dipped on the fingers, worn so thin the white cotton shows at the knuckles.

“Ma’am, you been waiting long?”

I tell him no, which is a lie, and he smiles like he knows it.

His name is Terrell. He talks the whole time he’s hooking up my car, and I think it’s because he can tell I’m scared of the dark out there. He tells me this is his third job today. Mornings he loads trucks at a warehouse, afternoons he changes tires, nights he tows. He says it like it’s nothing.

I ask when he sleeps. He laughs. “Sundays. Sometimes.”

When we pull into my driveway he won’t take the extra money I try to give him. I have $23 folded in the little bank envelope, and I hold it out and he pushes my hand back with that glove. I can still feel the rough rubber on my knuckles. Then he crouches by the flatbed to check a chain, holds up one hand with all five fingers spread, and grins.

“Get inside safe, Miss Lorraine. Lock your door.”

That’s the whole thing. A tow truck and a tired young man.

So I don’t know why I’m sitting here at two in the morning with my knees still aching from that cold vinyl seat and the envelope still in my hand. Or maybe I do. It’s the gloves. It’s “Sundays. Sometimes.” Because my boy used to say almost those exact words.

My Andre worked like that. Two jobs, then three, a little apartment he was so proud of, a jar on top of his fridge he called his someday money. He’d stop by still in his work boots and eat standing up, because he said if he sat down he wouldn’t get back up. He was working himself to the bone to become somebody. He already was somebody, he just didn’t know it. And then that Thursday came, the saddest day of my whole life, and the phone rang, and I never got to tell him to slow down.

I kept thinking about him the whole time I watched Terrell’s hands tonight. I wanted to tell that young man to rest. To go home. To let somebody take care of him for once. I didn’t say any of it. I just said thank you, and now the peas are melted and the house is so quiet I can hear the clock in the hall.

I still have Andre’s work gloves on the shelf in my hall closet, still shaped like his hands.

I don’t sleep. Around five I give up and make coffee, and it goes cold beside me while I stare at the roadside card on the counter. At eight I call the number and a woman with a smoker’s laugh answers. I ask for the driver who came out to Route 51 last night.

“Terrell? Honey, he’s off till four. He’s at the warehouse.”

I know I’m being a foolish old woman. I ask which warehouse anyway, and she tells me, because I guess I sound like somebody’s grandmother and not somebody dangerous.

The car still won’t start, so Paulette drives me. She doesn’t ask questions, which is the best thing about my sister. She turns the radio to the gospel station and hands me a peppermint from the bottom of her purse, half stuck to the wrapper.

First I make her stop at the farm supply store on Highway 9. I walk the aisles with my hip complaining until I find the work gloves. Real leather, lined, the good kind. $31.99. I have the $23 envelope he wouldn’t take, and I count out the rest in quarters and dimes from the coffee can Andre used to drop his change in. The girl at the register waits for me without sighing once. I could have hugged her.

The warehouse is a long gray building with trucks backed up to it like cattle at a trough. I sit in Paulette’s car for twenty minutes before I find the nerve to get out. A man in a yellow vest points me to the loading dock, and there he is, lifting boxes onto a pallet like they weigh nothing. Same red gloves. Same tired shoulders.

He sees me and stops. Then that smile.

“Miss Lorraine. Your car do something else?”

I hold out the bag. I tell him it’s not for the tow, I’m not paying him for anything. I say, “Your gloves are worn through, baby, and you need your hands.”

He takes them out slow, turns them over like they might be a trick. Then he pulls off the old ones finger by finger and I see his hands for the first time. Calluses on top of calluses. A healing cut across the left palm. A little burn by his thumb.

My son had the same hands.

I don’t mean to cry in front of a stranger on a loading dock at ten in the morning, but I do. And Terrell, who could have just been embarrassed and walked off, sets the gloves down on the pallet and pulls me into a hug that smells like cardboard and motor oil.

When I can talk again, I tell him about Andre. Not everything. Enough. The three jobs. The someday money. The Thursday.

He’s quiet a long time. Then he says his mama tells him the same thing. Slow down. Eat something. Come home. He’s saving for a house for her, a real one with a porch, because she’s rented the same two rooms since he was in diapers. He’s got $4,100 put away. He says it shy, like a kid showing a report card.

“That’s a lot of Sundays,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Yes ma’am. That’s a lot of Sundays.”

Before I go, I do something I haven’t done in a year and a half. I invite somebody to dinner. Sunday, two o’clock. Bring your mama.

He says he’ll try. I know what try means. I raised a son who said “I’ll try” about every family dinner for three years.

But Sunday at ten past two there’s a knock. Terrell in a pressed shirt, and beside him a small woman holding a sweet potato pie wrapped in foil. Her name is Odessa. She hugs me at the door like she’s known me forever, and maybe in a way she has. We’re the same kind of mother.

I cook too much. Fried chicken, greens, cornbread, the macaroni Andre used to fight his cousins over. Terrell eats two plates, then sits back on my couch just for a minute, he says, to let it settle.

He’s asleep in five.

Odessa looks at me and I look at her and neither of us says a word. I take the blue afghan my mother crocheted off the chair and cover him up to the shoulders. The new gloves are sticking out of his back pocket. He brought them to show me.

We let him sleep three hours. We do the dishes together and talk about our boys, the one I lost and the one she’s trying so hard to keep. I tell her about the phone call. She holds my wet hand in her wet hand over the sink and doesn’t say anything, which is exactly right.

When he wakes up he’s mortified, apologizing over and over. I tell him the only rule in my house is that tired people sleep.

I couldn’t tell Andre that in time. I can tell Terrell.