The Cake That Said 312

The highway east is two lanes most of the way. In the fall there are deer, and you learn where they cross.

There is a bad spot by the Lutheran cemetery and another past the turkey barns where the creek runs under the road.

Mom would keep watch for them. “Deer, Jodi,” she’d say, very calm, and point, and there would be a doe and two yearlings standing on the shoulder with their eyes lit up green in the headlights.

We didn’t talk much on the way there. She was usually tired and a little scared, though she never said scared.

I’d turn the radio to the farm report, and she’d listen to the hog prices like she still had hogs.

Going past the elevators in the little towns, she’d tell me who used to run them.

“That was Ernie Johnson’s. His wife made the best rhubarb bars in three counties. She went in that ice storm in ’91.”

Some mornings I’d bring cinnamon rolls from the gas station in town for the nurses. Not every time.

Just when I thought of it, or when one of them had mentioned a hard week, or a sick kid at home.

We pulled into the center’s lot at 5:20 nearly every time. The lights would be on inside, and you could see the chairs through the front windows, sixteen of them in a horseshoe, with the machines standing beside them like tall gray men.

Becky was usually the one who unlocked the door. She has been a dialysis nurse for twenty-two years and she has a laugh you can hear from the parking lot.

Sue was quieter, older, with hands so steady Mom said she never felt the needles.

I’d walk Mom in and wait while they weighed her, because they have to know how much fluid to pull off.

Then I’d help her get her coat off and her blanket on and her arm out where the fistula is.

The fistula is the place in her left arm where they join the artery and the vein so it can take the big needles.

You can feel it buzz under your fingers. Mom used to make the grandkids feel it and call it her motor.

When she was settled, I’d kiss the top of her head and say, “Mark’s coming at ten,” and she’d say, “I know, I know, go deliver your mail,” and I’d be back on the highway by 5:40 with the sky just going gray.

There were bad mornings. There was the February blizzard when the plow hadn’t been through, and I put Mark’s pickup in four-wheel drive and followed the tops of the fence posts for twenty miles with Mom praying out loud beside me.

There was the morning her pressure dropped so low in the chair that they called the ambulance, and Becky phoned me on my route, and I left a tub of mail with the clerk at the co-op and drove to the hospital in my postal fleece.

Pam moved to Minneapolis after college and never moved back. She works for an insurance company in claims, she has a nice townhouse in a suburb with a pond, and she has two boys who are grown now and living out east.

She calls Mom on Sunday nights. She comes home every Christmas for three days, and sometimes for the Fourth of July if the boys are around.

She sends flowers on Mother’s Day, and they are always very nice flowers.