The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

Why I did not call my son

My son Josh is thirty-seven. He is a lineman for the electric co-op, and the Saturday night before, a windstorm had come through Wayne and Decatur counties and taken down poles from Corydon to Lamoni.

He had been out since four in the morning Sunday. Sixteen-hour shifts, up in the bucket in the wind, then home to sleep six hours and go back.

I had sent him a text Sunday night that said, be careful, love you, and he had sent back a thumbs-up at one in the morning.

People have asked me since why I did not just call him and tell him what his wife had done.

It would have been easy. I had his number on speed dial right under the pharmacy.

But I had watched my own mother-in-law make Dennis choose between us, once, over a Thanksgiving, and I had watched what it cost him.

He was quiet for a month. I promised myself I would never do that to my son.

Josh had married Kayla nine years ago. He loves her. She is the mother of my grandchildren.

I was not going to put him in a truck in the wind with his mother on one ear and his wife on the other.

He called me anyway, Tuesday night, from the cab of the co-op truck. I could hear the generator running and somebody laughing in the background. “Mom,” he said, “I saw the thing Kayla put up. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to her when I get off.”

“You talk to your wife about whatever you want to talk to her about,” I told him. “Just don’t talk to her for me. Get some sleep. And wear your gloves.”

He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Are you still doing them this year?” And I realized I had already decided, even though I had not said it out loud to anybody.

“I’m doing them,” I said.

Kayla

I want to be fair to Kayla, because I have had a year now to understand her, and because she is not the woman that post made her sound like.

She grew up in Des Moines, in a subdivision where people do not know the names of the folks two doors down.

Josh met her at a friend’s wedding in Ankeny. She was a dental hygienist then and she still is, three days a week, in Centerville.

They moved down to Harlow three years ago, when the co-op job opened up. Kayla did everything right.

She joined the PTA the first fall and was president by the second. She organized the book fair and raised more money than anyone before her.

But in a town of eighteen hundred people, you can run the whole book fair and still be “Josh’s wife from Des Moines.” I heard women say it in the church basement. I probably said it myself once or twice, without meaning anything by it.

And every place she went, people knew me. The pharmacist. The lunch ladies. The man at the co-op counter. “Oh, you’re Joanne’s daughter-in-law. Tell her we said hi.” I thought that was a nice thing. I had never once thought about how it might sound to her.

I did not know any of that yet, that Monday. All I knew was that my son’s wife had warned the whole town about me, and that my grandkids were going to Ottumwa.