The Pickup List and the Blizzard

Why I let it be

Norm wanted me to call her that night. He is not a man who wants a fight, but he is a man who wants things said plain.

“You call her up and tell her it was a deer,” he said, standing at the sink with his reading glasses pushed up on his head.

“Tell her you’ve been driving these roads since you were twelve years old. Tell her that’s the most ridiculous thing you ever heard.”

“And then what,” I said.

He did not have an answer for that, and neither did I.

Here is the honest truth of why I let it be. Our son Dustin drives over the road. He is gone three weeks at a time, sometimes four, hauling refrigerated freight from Fargo to anywhere they send him.

He calls his kids every night from a truck stop or a rest area, and he calls me on Sundays.

If I picked up the phone and started a war with his wife, the person who would end up in the middle of it would be my son, alone in a truck cab in Wyoming at eleven o’clock at night, trying to decide which of the two women he loved was right.

I was not going to do that to him.

So I said nothing to Brittany. I said nothing to Dustin.

I told Norm I would rather be off a card than be the reason my son had a bad marriage, and Norm looked at me for a long time and then went out to check the cows.

I still saw the kids. I saw them at church on the Sundays Brittany came, and at Hunter’s Christmas program in the gym, where he was a shepherd with a dish towel on his head.

Brittany was polite to me. I was polite to her. That is the way a lot of families in a lot of small towns live, and I suppose we were no different.