The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

Some part of me was testing him. I am not proud of that. But I was sick and I was scared, and I think I needed to know what my son was made of.

He did not stop. Christmas came, and he drove me on the twenty-third, two days before, and handed me the slip in my own drive with a wreath on my door that he had helped me hang in better years.

Jolene sat two pews ahead of me at the Christmas Eve service.

She turned around once, saw me in my scarf, and gave me a smile that did not get all the way to her eyes. Then she faced front.

I could have called Jolene. I thought about it every week. But I would not stir up trouble between a husband and wife, not in my son’s house, not over money, and not when I did not know what she knew.

By January I was bald. I lost it all in about ten days, in the shower, in handfuls.

I bought two soft headscarves at the Walmart in Columbus, a blue one and a gray one, and I wore the blue one most.

At the cancer center, he never came up to the infusion room.

He would drop me at the front doors, go park in the garage, and sit in his truck for four hours with the engine off and his coat zipped to his chin.

Becky, my nurse, asked about it in January. “Is your son not coming up?” She is in her thirties, with her brown hair in a ponytail and a voice that could calm a horse.

“He doesn’t do well with hospitals,” I said. It was the first thing that came into my head, and I have no idea if it was true. I did not know much about my son that winter, it turned out.

His truck started making a noise in January. A squeal from under the hood when it was cold, then a knock.

He would cock his head at it the way his father does, and I would see him do math in his head.

Twelve rides. Twelve slips in my Bible. Four hundred and eighty dollars, which I could have told you to the penny even without the slips, because thirty-one years of keeping books does that to a person.

On the seventeenth of February, the twelfth Tuesday, I was so sick on the ride home that he had to pull over on the shoulder past Fremont so I could open the door and be sick into the snow.

He came around the truck and held my scarf back off my face while I did it.

His hand was on my back, steady, the way I used to hold his when he had the flu in third grade.

I thought, there, that is my boy. I thought, maybe today he will not.

Then we got to my house, and he walked me to the door, and before I had my coat off he held out the slip. Gas and time. $40.

“Same time next week?” he said.

I looked at that slip. I looked at him. He was looking at the floor, at the rug where his boots were dripping, and he looked older than thirty-six.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

He looked up at me then, a quick look, like he wanted to ask. He did not ask.

He nodded, put the check in his wallet, and went out to his truck, and I heard it squeal as he started it.