My Deputy Son-in-Law Towed My 17-Year-Old Grandson’s $1,800 Car Over One Cracked Taillight So We Fixed 64 Taillights for Free

The tow truck had its yellow lights spinning before my grandson even got his window all the way down.

I know that because his girlfriend, Hailey, sent me the video from the passenger seat. Forty-one seconds of it.

My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter while I was wiping down the stove. I watched it standing up, still holding the dishrag.

You could see red and blue lights flashing across the dashboard. You could see Tyler’s hands on the steering wheel at ten and two. The way I taught him in the church parking lot when he was fifteen.

And you could hear the voice at the window. Calm and flat as a county road.

“License. Registration. Proof of insurance.”

It was my son-in-law.

Deputy Craig Hanson. Married to my daughter Lisa for four years now. Standing at my grandson’s window on Main Street at seven o’clock on a Saturday night. In front of the Dairy Queen. In front of half the high school.

Tyler handed it all over. His voice on that video was steady. But I’ve known that boy since the day he was born. I heard the catch in it.

“Craig. It’s me.”

“I know who it is,” Craig said. “Your right taillight is cracked. It’s showing white to the rear. That’s an equipment violation.”

“I know. I ordered the part. The salvage yard in St. Cloud said it’d be here Tuesday.”

“It’s Saturday.”

That was the whole conversation.

The video ended with Hailey’s thumb sliding over the lens. And the sound of the tow truck backing up. That long, slow beeping that every single person in a small town knows by heart.

My name is Marge Lindstrom. I’m sixty-eight years old. I live in Pine Haven, Minnesota, a town of about three thousand people an hour north of St. Cloud.

I was a school cook at Pine Haven Elementary for thirty-one years.

And I need to tell you about the car. Because the car matters a lot more than you’d think.

It was a 2008 Pontiac Grand Prix. Silver. A hundred and eighty-six thousand miles on it. And a dent in the back quarter panel shaped exactly like a shopping cart.

Tyler paid eighteen hundred dollars for it the summer he turned sixteen.

He paid cash. Two summers of bagging groceries at the Coborn’s. And one summer walking beans for the Petersons out on County 4.

He kept the receipt in the glove box.

I’m not making that up. He kept that receipt in the glove box like it was the deed to a farm.

The taillight got cracked in the school parking lot the second week of October. Somebody backed a pickup into it and drove off.

Tyler came home that day and didn’t say one word at supper. Finally I asked him what was wrong.

“Somebody hit my car,” he said. “Not bad. Just the light.”

“Did they leave a note?”

“No.”

He pushed his hotdish around his plate.

“I already called the salvage yard. Forty-five dollars for a used one. It’ll be here Tuesday.”

That was Tyler.

He didn’t cry about it. He didn’t wait around for somebody else to fix it. He called the salvage yard himself.

He was seventeen years old.

Tyler has lived with me since he was fourteen. People in town know the story. Or they know a version of it. So let me tell you the true one.

My daughter Lisa had Tyler young. His father works the oil fields out in western North Dakota. He calls on Sundays, when he remembers.

Lisa raised Tyler mostly on her own. She worked nights as a nurse at the hospital over in Little Falls. I helped wherever I could.

When Tyler was thirteen, Lisa married Craig Hanson.

I want to be fair to Craig.

He didn’t drink. He didn’t run around. He went to work every day and came home every night. He was good to my daughter in every way a woman can see from the outside.

But he was hard on Tyler.

Never with his hands. Never that. With rules.

A curfew posted on the refrigerator. A chore chart with initials. Tyler’s grades checked every Friday on the school website. Tyler’s phone taken away for a whole week because he left a wet towel on the bathroom floor.

Tyler took it for about a year.

Then one night in March, he walked a mile and a half across town to my house in a snowstorm. With his backpack and his pillow. And he knocked on my back door at eleven o’clock at night.

“Grandma,” he said. “Can I stay here for a while?”

A while turned into three years.

Lisa cried about it. Then she agreed to it. Then she stopped crying about it.

She came for supper on Sundays when she wasn’t working. Craig came with her about half the time. He and Tyler said maybe eleven words to each other across my table.

I retired from the school kitchen the same year Tyler moved in.

Thirty-one years of serving lunch at the elementary. And I served it to Tyler every school day from kindergarten through fifth grade. Tater tot hotdish on Thursdays. He always asked for extra.

Having him with me wasn’t hard.

It was the easiest thing I ever did. And I’d do it again tomorrow.

The county tow yard is out on the county road past the fairgrounds. A chain-link fence around a gravel lot, with a little white office trailer. The county contracts with a private towing outfit. And the outfit charges what it charges.

I drove Tyler out there Monday morning before school.

He hadn’t said much all weekend. He’d gone to church with me Sunday and sat through the whole sermon with his arms folded. Pastor Ron looked at him twice from the pulpit.

The woman working in the trailer was named Deb. I knew her from Tuesday bingo at the Legion hall.

“Marge,” she said. Then she saw Tyler, and she knew exactly why we were there.

Everybody already knew.

“Two-eighty,” Deb said. “Two-twenty for the tow. Sixty for two days of storage.”

“Two days? It’s been a day and a half.”

“Any part of a day counts,” Deb said. She said it kindly. “I’m sorry, Marge. I don’t make the rates.”

I paid it out of my purse in twenties.

Two hundred and eighty dollars is a good piece of a month for a retired school cook. Tyler watched me count it out on that counter. His ears went red.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said in the car.

“I know you will.”

“I mean it, Grandma. Every dollar.”

“Tyler. I know you will.”

The ticket was separate. A hundred and thirty dollars with all the fees once it went through the court administrator. Tyler insisted on paying that one himself.

He drove his car home with the cracked light. Very carefully. In broad daylight. And he parked it in my garage and didn’t touch it again until the part came.

People asked me later why I didn’t just call the sheriff and be done with it.

I did.

I called him Monday afternoon.

I’ve known Sheriff Halvorson since he was a skinny little boy in my lunch line. He took my call himself.

“Marge,” he said. “I heard.”

“Is it your policy to tow a child’s car over a taillight?”

There was a long breath on the other end of the line.

Ezoic
“No, ma’am. It is not. Equipment violations get a ticket and a fix-it notice. A deputy can tow if he judges a car unsafe to drive. That’s a judgment call. And I’ll be honest with you, Marge. That was a hard call to justify.”

“So what happens now?”

“I’ll talk to him. That’s what happens. I’ll talk to him, and it’ll go in his file that we talked.”

He paused.

“I can’t give you the money back, Marge. I wish I could.”

“I didn’t call about the money.”

“I know you didn’t.”

That was as far as it could go. I knew that before I ever picked up the phone.

I wasn’t going to try to cost my daughter’s husband his job. I wasn’t going to stand up at a county board meeting and turn my family into the gossip at the Cenex for a whole year. Lisa had to go home to that man every morning after her night shift.

But I couldn’t let it just sit there either.

I couldn’t let my grandson believe this was how the grown-ups in his life fixed things.

It was Tyler’s idea, really. I want to give him the credit. It belongs to him.

Tuesday night, the salvage yard part came in. After supper, he and I went out to the garage to put it in.

A Grand Prix taillight comes out with a few nuts from inside the trunk. It took him about fifteen minutes with a socket wrench while I held the flashlight.

When he plugged it in and I stepped on the brake, the new light came on. Bright and red.

He stood behind the car looking at it for a long time.

“Half the cars in this town have a light out,” he finally said. “Did you know that? I counted on the way home from school today. Eleven cars. Just between the school and here.”
“Eleven?”

“Mr. Peterson’s truck has had a brake light out since August. Is Craig going to tow Mr. Peterson?”

I didn’t say anything. I handed him the rag to wipe his hands.

“Most people don’t even know,” he said. “You can’t see your own taillights. You’d have to have somebody stand behind you.”

And there it was.

I felt it in my chest. The way you feel a good idea before you have the words for it.

“Then let’s stand behind them,” I said.

He looked at me.