The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

The neighbor across the road

Merle lives across the gravel from us, in the white house with the windmill that does not pump anymore. He farmed that quarter for fifty years before he rented it out to the Jensen boys.

The Saturday after the twelfth ride, he came over to bring my mail up from the box, which he had started doing in December without anybody asking him to. He stood in my kitchen with his cap in his hands.

“Tanner taking you Tuesday?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m driving myself this week.”

Merle turned his cap around once in his hands. He has big farmer hands, cracked at the knuckles, and he is not a man who wastes words. He looked at me for a long time.

“That’s a long way,” he said finally. “Seventy miles. In February.”

“I’ve driven it before.”

“Not after they put the poison in you, you haven’t.”

“I’ll manage,” I said, and I said it in the voice I used to use on salesmen at the co-op who wanted their invoice paid early. Merle knows that voice. He set my mail on the table and he left.

The thirteenth Tuesday

I got up at five on the twenty-fourth of February. The furnace was running and the kitchen windows were black and I could hear the wind working at the corner of the house.

I had my coffee, which tasted like tin, and a piece of dry toast, and I read the Psalm where the ribbon sat, and I took the twelve slips out of my Bible.

I squared them up on the table. White paper, torn along the wire, square printing on every one. I folded them inside two sheets of plain white paper and dropped them into my purse.

I tied the soft blue headscarf over my bald head, snug at the back.

Then I set my navy felt church hat on top of it, the one with the narrow brim that I save for Easter and funerals.

I put on my good slacks and my heavy gray wool wrap, the one Dale bought me at the Younkers in Omaha the year before they closed.

I looked in the hall mirror and I looked like a woman going somewhere on purpose.

My car is a 2009 Buick LaCrosse, maroon, with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it. Dale keeps it up.

It started on the first try in the cold, and I sat in the drive and let the defroster work.

Across the gravel, there was a light on in Merle’s kitchen. That was not unusual. Merle is up at four most days out of habit. I did not think anything of it.

I backed out at a quarter after six and drove through town in the dark. The elevator lights were on.

I took the highway east toward Fremont. The fields on both sides were white and flat and went on forever, and every so often there was a yard light at a farmstead like a ship out on the water.

My hands shook the whole way, from the treatments, from the cold, and from knowing what I was doing.

About ten miles out, I noticed headlights behind me. Way back, a quarter mile maybe. I watched them in the mirror for a while. They did not get closer and they did not drop back.

At Fremont I stopped at the light, and the headlights stopped too, way back, and when I turned onto the four-lane, they turned as well.

I thought, well, lots of people go to Omaha on a Tuesday.

The sun came up behind the Omaha skyline as I came in, pink and then white, and I cried a little, because I had not seen a sunrise from behind the wheel in a long time, and I was doing it myself.

I found a spot on the third level of the parking garage, close to the elevator.

I sat there for a minute with the engine off. My knees were weak and I let them be weak. Then I got out.