The Night I Drove Three Hours for My Kids

He also drank. Not every day, not at first. But after his divorce six years ago, more. Tom knew it. I knew it. We had talked about it more than once at our kitchen table, and we had never once said it to his face.

When Darrell offered to take the kids camping because Tom couldn’t, I hesitated. I asked Tom straight out if it was a good idea.

Tom called his brother and asked him point blank. Darrell promised. No beer on the trip, not one. “They’re my niece and nephew, Tommy,” he said. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

So I said yes. I packed their sleeping bags and their bug spray and their swimsuits. I waved them off on Friday morning from the end of our driveway. That part is on me, and I’ve made my peace with it, but I won’t pretend it isn’t there.

“What did you say to him?” I asked Tom, somewhere past Anoka.

There was a long quiet on the line.

“I told him I didn’t have it. I told him he knew I didn’t have it, and he knew why.” Tom stopped. “Then he said some things about me not being much of a man, sitting on my can while my wife pays the bills. And I said he was a drunk, and that’s why his wife left.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I shouldn’t have said it, Beck,” he said. “I knew he’d been drinking. I could hear it. And I said it anyway.”

“You didn’t leave two children on a bluff,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But I lit the match.”

I have thought about that sentence a hundred times since. It is the most honest thing my husband has ever said to me, and I loved him more for it, sitting there in the dark on Highway 61 with the river somewhere off to my left.

He stayed on with me until Hastings. Then his battery got low, and I told him to plug it in and try his brother again.

Site 14

The last hour was the longest of my life.

Highway 61 runs right along the river down through Red Wing and Lake City and Wabasha. In the daytime it is the prettiest drive in Minnesota. At night it is just white lines and the occasional pair of headlights coming at you around a curve, and the dark shape of the bluffs on one side.

I prayed. I don’t mind saying it. I’m not much for praying out loud, but I prayed in that van like I was back in Sunday school, the plain kind of prayer where you just say the names over and over.

I thought about Ellie walking down that campground road in the dark, by herself, to ask strangers for a phone charger. Nine years old. She’s the one who still sleeps with a stuffed rabbit.

I thought about Josh staying up at the site alone while she went, because somebody had to watch the tent. Of course he did. He’s eleven and he thinks he’s the man of the family when his dad’s laid up.

I came off the interstate and wound up the park road at 12:58. The park gate was open, and right inside it, under the little light at the ranger station, stood an old man in a red flannel shirt with a flashlight.

He raised it and waved it twice, slow, like a man flagging a plane.