The summer was long and heavy. In northern Indiana, the humidity rolls off the cornfields and just hangs in the air like a wet wool blanket. I didn’t drive the truck much. I mostly walked down to the corner store for milk and bread, but Sarah kept coming over, looking at the weeds growing up around the tires.

“The radiator is leaking, Dad,” she told me one evening while she was putting some Tupperware in my fridge. “And the registration is due next month. There is no point in paying it.”

I knew she was right. But admitting she was right felt like agreeing that Martha was really gone, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

I defended that old Ford like it was a castle. I told Sarah the straight-six engine would outlive both of us. I told her I needed it to haul firewood, even though my back hadn’t let me split a log in four years.

I was lying to her, and I think she knew it. That is the part that makes me feel small now. I was just a stubborn old man hiding behind a rusty piece of Detroit steel.

Yesterday, a young fella named Miller called about the ad Sarah had put online. He was about twenty-five, with grease under his fingernails and a baby seat in the back of his sedan. He looked at the Ford’s engine like it was a holy relic.

“My grandpa had one of these,” he said, touching the rusted fender with real respect. “They don’t build them like this anymore, sir.”

He offered me twelve hundred dollars cash. I took it. He was a good kid, and the truck needed to run, not rot in my gravel driveway. But before he took the keys, I had to clean out the cab.

I went out there with a plastic grocery bag. I took out the old ice scraper, three dried-up ballpoint pens, and a handful of zinc washers from the glove box. Then I looked up at the sun visor.

The envelope was thick with dust. I unclipped it and sat down on the bench seat, my boots resting on the worn rubber floor mat. The paper felt dry and fragile, like old leaf veins.

I read the list again. “Eggs. Bread. Folgers.”

But then my eye caught something at the bottom, right near the torn paper seam where the return address used to be. She had used a black felt-tip pen. Martha only used those black pens when she was sitting at her roll-top desk, writing cards or signing legal documents.

It was a different ink, written in her neat, tight script.

“For Ray’s 75th,” it said. My seventy-fifth birthday is this Saturday.

And right below that, there were five more words.

“Buy the red boat, Ray.”