Truck on a country road

Andy Magee photo

It's been a while since I've posted anything for "The Mag" (formerly Magpie Tales) but the prompt photo, by Andy Magee, suddenly said something to me today. It spoke in prose, not poetry, so here goes...for The Mag.
Also posted for Open Link Monday at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

HER TRUCK

Kathryn had always wanted a truck. A yellow one, she thought, for visibility in bad weather.

The weather was certainly bad enough the day she finally bought her truck. It was red, supposedly a safe color because fire engines were red, but mostly because a yellow truck wasn’t in stock.

She drove it home through the fog, the drizzle, and the high, high winds. Neither the berm, nor the hedges, nor the winter-bare trees provided protection for the open back of the truck where she carried building supplies, but at least she’d had everything well wrapped.

Kathryn smiled as she saw the shabby old fence. It would be one of her restoration projects soon, but the house came first.

Her husband never understood why she wanted to fix up the house and property.

“No one ever comes here anyway,” he always said. “It all looks okay to me.”

And, “I don’t see why we need a truck. My car does fine.”

“Fine,” she thought, shaking her head as she drove the truck down the little hill, where she could see tracks in the grass beside their road, tracks made by the car doing “fine” on an icy day recently.

“I’ll show him fine,” she laughed. “It’s a good thing I got a winch on the front of the truck, too, because you never know when you might need to pull something out...a tree out of the ground, a car out of a ditch...”

And she laughed again as she passed her husband’s car, in the ditch beside the road, where it had been for almost a week. He’d had to walk home in the ice and snow, and he’d had to eat humble pie once he reached the house.

“Maybe we really should get a truck,” he mumbled as he stood by the fireplace, trying to get warm.

“Oh, there’s no rush,” Kathryn had replied.

It was almost a week before someone came to the house: a delivery van with a box of brochures her husband had ordered. He was out walking the dog when Kathryn hitched a ride to town in the delivery van.

“I’ll pull his car out tomorrow,” she said to herself. “That will make him happy. But I wonder why he left the window open on the driver’s side. That seat is going to be awfully wet by now.”

Kay L. Davies, December, 2012