The Night I Drove Three Hours for My Kids

The Road South

It is about three hours from our place outside Princeton to Great River Bluffs, which sits on the high bluffs above the Mississippi just south of Winona.

I drive a school bus for a living. Fourteen years now, and I’ve got the summer school route this year, so I was still in the habit of early mornings and steady hands. I know how to drive at night. I know how to keep my speed where it ought to be when every part of me wants to floor it.

Tom called back before I hit the highway. I put him on the speaker clipped to the visor and he stayed with me all the way down past the Cities.

For the first twenty miles, neither of us said much. Then I asked him what the fight was about, because I could tell from his voice he already knew.

“The money,” he said.

Back in April, Tom’s truck dropped its transmission in the parking lot of the lumberyard where he works. We didn’t have the money for a rebuild. Darrell did. He drove over that same night and wrote Tom a check for $2,000, and said pay it back when you can, little brother.

Tom had been paying it back $100 a month, every month, cash in an envelope. He was proud of that. He kept track on a scrap of paper taped inside the cupboard by the coffee.

Then in June he fell off a ladder cleaning the gutters on his mother’s house and shattered his ankle. Surgery. The cast. The lumberyard doesn’t carry short-term disability for the yard crew, so that was six weeks without a paycheck, and the $100 envelopes stopped.

“He called tonight about seven,” Tom said. “Said he needed the whole thing. All of it, now. Said he was behind on his own stuff.”

“Was he drinking?”

Tom didn’t answer right away, which was an answer.

I need to tell you about Darrell, and I need to be fair about it, because this story doesn’t make sense if you think he’s a monster. He isn’t.

Darrell is three years older than Tom. Their dad left when Tom was six, and Darrell was the one who taught him to throw a ball and change oil and stand up straight in church. When Tom and I got married, Darrell cried harder than either of our mothers.

He was the uncle who took Josh fishing at five in the morning and let Ellie steer the truck in the hayfield on her daddy’s lap. He never forgot a birthday. He had a card for every one, with a ten-dollar bill inside and “Love, Uncle D” in big square letters.