The Movers They Sent To My Farm

The farm was where I went when home got to be too much, which was often. From the time I was nine years old, my grandparents let me spend every school break and most weekends out there, and I loved it the way you love the one place where nobody is measuring you against somebody else. I learned to drive a tractor before I learned to parallel park. I sat up with my grandfather through calving season, and I sat up with my grandmother through something worse, three years of chemotherapy that started when I was in high school and did not let go until I was a sophomore in college. I drove home from campus most weekends that whole stretch, not because anyone made me, but because nobody else was doing it. My mother visited on holidays. Kelso visited twice, both times for money.

I remember one night in particular from that chemotherapy stretch, the kind of night that tells you everything about who is actually going to show up in your life. My grandmother had a bad reaction to a new round of treatment, and I drove the forty minutes out from campus at two in the morning because my grandfather could not lift her on his own anymore and there was nobody else to call. I sat on the bathroom floor with her for three hours, a hand towel soaked in cool water pressed to the back of her neck, while my grandfather stood in the doorway trying not to let either of us see how scared he was. Somewhere around four in the morning she got her breath back enough to laugh at something on the radio, and my grandfather looked at me over her head and said, quiet, like he was filing it away for later, “Your mother would not have come.” He was not wrong, and we both knew it, and neither of us said another word about it that night.