The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha
How it came to be Tanner
I should back up, because none of us were villains in this.
I found the lump in October. By the middle of November I had a diagnosis, a port in my chest, and a schedule from an oncologist in Omaha who was younger than my son and kinder than I expected.
Sixteen treatments, she said. One every Tuesday, the same chair, the same nurses, about four hours each time when you added up the premedications, the drip itself, and the waiting.
We live in a town of about fifteen hundred people in eastern Nebraska.
We have a grain elevator, a Casey’s, two churches, a Legion hall, and a café that closes at two. The cancer center is seventy miles away.
My husband, Dale, is sixty-four. He has driven truck for most of our marriage, over the road for a company out of Grand Island, and that winter he was running freight down to Texas and back.
Dale wanted to quit. I want that on the record too. The night I told him, he said he would call dispatch in the morning and park the truck and drive me himself, every Tuesday, for as long as it took.
But Dale’s job carried our health insurance, and the company plan covered only drivers who kept a full run schedule. A man who took every Tuesday off got cut to part-time, and I was sixty-one and four years shy of Medicare.
If Dale lost those hours, the insurance went with them, and there is no paying for cancer in Omaha without it.
So we sat at that same kitchen table and did the arithmetic, the way we have done all our lives. And the arithmetic said Dale kept driving, and somebody else drove me.
Our daughter lives in Colorado with three little ones. My sister is in Fremont and does not drive on the interstate anymore. The church ladies all had husbands to look after or no car for the interstate. Our neighbor Merle is seventy-five and his eyes are not what they were.
Then Tanner called. He is thirty-six, our oldest, and he lives eight miles out of town with his wife, Jolene, in the house they bought from her grandmother.
“I’ll take you, Mom,” he said on the phone. “Every Tuesday. Don’t you worry about it. I’ll work it out with the plant.”
He worked maintenance at the ethanol plant south of town. He had been there eleven years.
He could fix anything with a motor in it, and I was so proud of him for saying it that I had to hand the phone to Dale.
And then, the first Tuesday, there was that slip of paper in my lap.
Twelve Tuesdays
I did not say anything to Dale about the slips. I want to explain why, because I have asked myself a hundred times whether I was right.
Dale was seven hundred miles away, sleeping in a sleeper cab at a truck stop outside Amarillo.
If I had told him, he would have done one of two things, and I did not want either one.
He would have called Tanner and said something he could not take back. Or he would have turned that truck around and come home, and we would have lost the hours and the insurance over forty dollars.
So when Dale called me every night at nine, I told him the drip went fine, and the nurses were sweet, and Tanner was a good driver and kept the cab warm. All of that was true.
I did not tell him the rest. I did not tell anybody.
I took each slip and slid it into my Bible, in the Psalms, right where the ribbon marker sits, and I wrote a check every single week.
The second Tuesday, Tanner was quiet the whole way. I tried to talk about Jolene’s mother, about the Christmas program at church, about anything. He said “yeah” and “huh” and kept both hands on the wheel.
The third Tuesday was the sixteenth of December. There was a ground blizzard west of Fremont and he drove it at forty miles an hour with his jaw set, and I was grateful, and then he handed me the slip.
I could have said something. I know that. A sensible woman would have said, “Tanner, what on earth is this?” and we would have had it out right there in the cab.
But I raised that boy. I taught him his prayers and his manners and how to write a thank you note.
I wanted to know if he would stop on his own, without his mother having to tell him he ought to.