The Cake That Said 312

Mom looked at the fish for a long time. Then she said, “I’d like to see Kayla graduate,” and Kayla is my youngest, and she was a sophomore then, so that was the decision made.

The nearest center with an opening was in the county seat forty miles east of us.

Three mornings a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, four hours in the chair each time. They offered her the 5:30 chair because it was the only one open.

I remember the social worker, a kind woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, asking who would be driving her.

She asked it gently, like she had asked it a thousand times and knew how often the answer was nobody.

The county van could get Mom there, but it didn’t start running until seven.

Mom couldn’t drive anymore, not after the cataract and not after the dizzy spell on the Fergus road. Dad has been gone eleven years.

“I’ll drive her,” I said. I didn’t think about it at all.

I said it the way you say you’ll bring the potato salad to a funeral lunch, because somebody has to and you’re standing right there.

I have carried a rural route out of our post office for nineteen years.

It is 112 miles of gravel and blacktop, 486 boxes, and I run it in my own Subaru, sitting in the middle of the seat and reaching across to the passenger window.

We case our mail starting at seven thirty. If I picked Mom up at quarter to five, I could have her in the chair by 5:30, drive the forty miles back, and be standing at my case with a few minutes to spare.

Getting her home was the problem. Her four hours were up around half past nine, and I would be somewhere out past the township hall with a tub of catalogs on the seat by then.

Mark solved that. He works at the grain elevator, and he went in and talked to his boss, a big quiet man named Dale who lost his own mother to kidney failure.

Dale told him to take his break whenever Arlene needed picking up.

So Mark brought her home three late mornings a week, and he never once complained about it, and he never once mentioned it to anybody either.

That is the kind of man I married. He thinks talking about what you do ruins it.

The rides there were mine. In the dark, before the sun, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. That was the arrangement, and it held for two years without a single missed morning.

My alarm went off at 4:10. I’d make coffee and fill the big green thermos that was my dad’s, and I’d fill a smaller one with hot water for Mom, because she can’t have much fluid and she liked to hold something warm.

From December to March I kept a shovel in the back of the car.

More mornings than I can count, I shoveled her three front steps and the path to the car before I knocked, because she would not let me skip it.

“If I fall and break a hip, then you’ll have two problems,” she’d say, standing in the doorway in her church coat with her purse on her arm.

She always wore her church coat to dialysis. I never asked her why.

She’d be ready every single time. She’d have her blanket folded over her arm, the pink fleece one with the cardinals on it, because the center keeps the room cold and the machine makes you colder still.