The Widow Across the Gravel Road

Why I did not just find somebody else

People who live in a city will want to know why I did not put the boys in daycare. I wish I had a better answer, but the answer is that there was no daycare.

Our town has about two thousand people, a Casey’s, a Lutheran church and a Catholic one, the co-op, and a grade school. There was one licensed daycare center, and it closed at six. The nearest place that kept children overnight was not a place at all. It was a lady in Decorah who had a waiting list until the fall.

I work nights because nights pay a differential, and because two nights a week is what the floor needed when I came back after Sam. Seven at night to seven in the morning, Tuesday and Wednesday. Twelve hours on my feet, then a half hour of charting, then a forty minute drive home on gravel.

My husband, Travis, drives over the road for a company out of Cedar Rapids. He is gone two weeks at a time, home four or five days, then gone again. That is the job. It pays the mortgage on our little place, and it pays it every month, which is more than most jobs around here can promise.

So there was my mother, six miles away, already up early, already feeding three grandchildren most days of the week. There was nobody else.

What Travis said

I called Travis that Friday night. He was parked at a truck stop outside Amarillo, and I could hear the reefer unit running on the trailer next to him.

I told him about the notepad. He was quiet long enough that I thought the call had dropped.

“I’ll call her,” he said.

“Please don’t.”

“Jenna, that’s your mom charging you to babysit her own grandkids while you’re at work taking care of other people’s grandmas.”

“I know what it is.”

He let out a breath. Travis is not a talker. He fixes things. When something cannot be fixed with a socket set, it bothers him in a way I have learned to give room to.

“I can bid on a local route,” he said. “The feed mill is hiring drivers. It’s less money, but I’d be home nights.”

“It’s eleven thousand dollars less,” I said. “We looked.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

I thought about it. I thought about Owen at the table at Grandma’s, coloring next to Kaylee. I thought about my mother, who had been alone in that house in town since Dad died three years before.

“Nothing yet,” I said. “I’m going to pay her. On time, every Friday. And I’m going to keep the pages.”

“Keep the pages,” Travis said. “Okay. I’m with you.”

I have told people since that my husband was gone through all of this, and that is true. But he was not absent. He called every night he was out, from Amarillo and Joplin and Little Rock, and he asked me every Friday if I had paid her. And every Friday I said yes.

The recipe box

I kept the pages in Grandma Price’s old tin recipe box, the one with the faded strawberries on the lid. Behind the card for her rhubarb bars I put each yellow sheet, folded once.

Mom wrote Pd. on every one after I paid. Sometimes she wrote the date. Once in February, when I paid her with a check because I had not been to the bank, she wrote “check #1147” in the corner, like a store would.

I did the math on the kitchen table one night in February after the boys were asleep. One hundred and eighty dollars a week, twenty-six weeks through the end of June, was $4,680.

That was what Travis and I had been putting toward Owen’s teeth. The dentist in town had already told us he would need to see the orthodontist in Decorah, that his top jaw was narrow and an expander would save him a lot of trouble later. The orthodontist’s office had said four thousand, give or take, for the first phase.

I put the pencil down. I did not cry. I just sat there and listened to the furnace kick on.