Part 9: We Drove Home in Silence—But Everything Had Changed
The Chevy started on the third try.
I’d spent the better part of the walk back worrying it wouldn’t, that we’d be stuck out there in the mud with a bag of heart meds and nothing but silence between us. But when I turned the key, the old engine gave a low growl, then settled into a rhythm like it hadn’t missed a beat in twenty years.
Dad let out a soft grunt beside me. Not quite a laugh, not quite surprise. Just that dry, tired sound he made when something went better than he expected but worse than he would ever admit.
We didn’t say much as I put it in gear and pulled onto the gravel road.
We didn’t need to.
The windshield wipers squeaked with every pass. Outside, the rain had softened again, turned into a steady curtain over the cornfields.
He sat with one hand resting on the dash, the other holding a paper bag with his prescription bottles, folded neatly at the top like it mattered.
His fingers tapped lightly, rhythmically. I didn’t know if it was nerves, or pain, or maybe some old habit from his time in the service—waiting, steadying himself, passing time by drumming it into the world.
“You remember how to get back?” he asked eventually.
I nodded. “Still burned into my brain.”
He leaned back into the seat, let out a breath that fogged up the side window.
I glanced at him.
His face was pale, but there was a softness I hadn’t seen before. The hard edge of him had dulled, not from sickness, but from something deeper—something like surrender.
Not the weak kind. Not giving up.
The kind where you finally let yourself be helped.
The kind where a man lets his son take the wheel and doesn’t fight it.
We passed the bend in the road where the tree he’d mentioned earlier stood like an old soldier, blackened from lightning but upright still.
He didn’t point this time. Didn’t need to.
He knew I saw it.
And I think he knew I’d remember it—maybe more now than ever.
After a while, I reached over and turned on the radio.
It crackled like it always had, the dial still sticking just past the local news station.
And then, like something out of a movie, that song came on.
“Take It to the Limit.”
The Eagles. The same song that played the first time he handed me the keys.
We both heard it.
He looked at me, barely turning his head.
And for the first time in my life, Frank Wilkins smiled wide and without restraint.
“Still know the words?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
But his hand tapped just a little louder.
When we got back to the house, the yard was slick with puddles, and the garden hose had come loose from its hook. I parked in front of the barn.
Dad didn’t move to get out.
He just sat there, eyes fixed on the porch swing.
“I replaced the chains last summer,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Didn’t think I’d live long enough to sit in it again.”
We walked up together—slow, careful steps. I held his elbow, and he let me.
We sat side by side on that swing.
The wood creaked.
The air was clean again, the kind of clean that only comes after a storm.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded envelope. It wasn’t sealed.
“Found this when you were asleep,” he said.
I opened it.
It was a letter to me. Written in 1986. Never mailed.
He’d scratched out the first few lines, but I could still read them:
“Tom—
We argued last night. I know I was too hard on you.
You’ve got your mother’s fire and my silence. That makes for a storm.
But you’re good. I see it even when I pretend I don’t.”
I put it back in the envelope and handed it to him.
He shook his head.
“It’s yours. I kept it too long already.”
We sat in silence for what felt like hours.
No need to say anything else.
Just let it settle.
Let the quiet stretch out.
Let the old wounds breathe.
The rain picked up again, light this time. It danced on the porch roof and made a soft ticking against the railing.
Dad leaned back.
“You know,” he said, “I always worried I wasn’t enough.”
“You were,” I said simply.
He nodded.
Then said, “So were you.”
That was the moment the last wall between us crumbled.
Not with fanfare. Not with tears.
Just two sentences, spoken softly in the middle of a rainstorm, between two men who had finally stopped measuring love by volume.
We stayed there until the sun dipped low and the sky turned the color of wet ash.
Then I made him dinner—canned soup, toast, and one of the low-sodium frozen meals the clinic nurse had sent home.
He hated it.
But he ate it.
Later that night, while he slept in his chair, I sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and every letter he’d written me.
Some were half-finished.
Some were angry.
One was just a grocery list with a line at the bottom:
“Tell Tom the fence needs fixing.”
But every single one said, in its own way, that he loved me.
That he always had.
He just didn’t know how to say it without a hammer in his hand or a steering wheel under it.
When I went to bed, I left one of the letters on the armrest next to him.
The one from 1993.
The one where he said goodbye when I left for good.
Because now I knew.
Neither of us was going anywhere—not yet.
[End of Part 9]
👉 Part 10: I Let My Son Drive the Truck the Next Morning…
It was his first time behind the wheel.
I tossed him the keys without looking back.
And just like that, a silence was broken.
Because when you grow up learning love without words—
Sometimes the loudest thing you can do is let go.
