The Thank You Cards That Told the Truth

The brace is supposed to hold a curve while a child grows. Cody’s did not hold. That winter the X-ray came back at fifty-two degrees, and the surgeon in Omaha, a calm man with very clean hands, drew it for us on the paper that covers the exam table. Rods and screws. A fusion. Five hours on the table, four days in the hospital, six months before he could pick up a bat.

“You’ll be taller when you wake up,” he told Cody. “About an inch. Most boys like that part.”

They set it for June 17, so he would have the summer to heal.

Travis welds for a shop out on the highway that builds stock trailers and flatbeds. The insurance through the shop is the kind where you are covered, and thankful to be, and still owe more than you have. Our share was going to come to $7,350 before we bought one tank of gas to Omaha. On top of that Travis would be off two weeks without pay, because I could not lift a twelve-year-old with a fresh spine by myself.

We had a savings account with a little over nine hundred dollars in it and a sixteen-foot fishing boat Travis loved.

It was Rhonda who said the word benefit. I will give her that, because it is true. She said it at Mom’s kitchen table in March, and she had a legal pad out before I had finished saying we could not ask people for money.

“You are not asking,” she said. “I am. That’s the whole point of a sister.”

She had a flyer in every window downtown inside of a week. Benefit supper for Cody, Friday, April 24, the church fellowship hall, five to eight. Smoked pork loin, cheesy potatoes, green beans, a roll and a bar. Free-will donation.

The men’s group at church did the cooking, the way they do for everything. Dennis pulled his smoker trailer into the church lot at four in the morning. Gene and Larry ran the serving line in their feed-store caps. The women brought eleven kinds of bars. I know it was eleven because Marcy saved Cody one of each.

We were not there. I still have trouble with that. The scan the surgeon needed before he would operate had exactly one opening before June, that same Friday at half past four at Children’s, and you do not turn down an opening at Children’s. Rhonda said go. So while the town stood in a line for my son, Travis and Cody and I sat in a waiting room in Omaha, and I heard the rest afterward, from the people who were there.

I heard the line went out the hall doors and down the sidewalk past the church sign. I heard there was a gray metal cash box at the door and a red coffee can by the bars, and that by seven o’clock Rhonda was pressing the bills down with the flat of her hand.

Mr. Fenske has been the treasurer of our church since before I was born. He is eighty-one. He taught shop at the high school, he carries a mechanical pencil in his shirt pocket, and he has never in his life rounded a number.

He found my sister that afternoon while they were setting out folding chairs.

“Rhonda,” he said, “I’d be glad to run this through the church for you. We have a benevolence fund for just this kind of thing. Two of us count it tonight, two that are not related, we both sign the sheet, and it goes in the night deposit on my way home. Then the church writes the check to the hospital and Beth has a piece of paper for it.”