The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

What Tanner told me

He told it to his hands. He would not look up. I let him, because I know my son, and if I had made him look at me he would have stopped talking.

“They laid me off,” he said. “The first of December. The Monday. They cut the whole night maintenance crew. Eleven years, and they handed me a box for my stuff and walked me to the door.”

The first of December. I counted backward in my head. My first treatment had been the second.

“The day after they let me go,” he said, “I drove you to your first chemo. And I sat in that garage for four hours, and I thought, I can’t tell her. She’s got cancer. She doesn’t need this too.”

“Oh, honey,” I said.

“Jolene’s at the school as a para. She makes fourteen dollars an hour. The truck payment is four-sixty a month and we’ve still got two years on it, and the house needed a furnace last fall.”

“I had unemployment coming, but it took weeks to start, and it’s not much. I was putting gas in that truck on the credit card. And it takes about nine gallons to get you here and back.”

He finally looked at me then, just for a second.

“Gas was twenty-six dollars, Mom. Give or take. That’s all I needed. Twenty-six. I wrote forty because I thought if I just asked for gas money, you’d know something was wrong. Forty sounded like a business. Like a guy with a job charging for his time.”

I sat with that. I am a bookkeeper. I understood it the way I would understand a column of numbers that did not add up until somebody showed you the line they left off.

“Jolene told me to just tell you,” he said. “Every week, she told me. She said, your mother will understand. She said, she’d give you the shirt off her back. And I said, that’s exactly why I can’t.”

He put his face in his hands.

“Every week I wrote that slip, I hated myself. I’d sit in that garage and I’d hear you up here in my head, and I’d think about you paying me to drive you to chemo, and I’d think, what kind of a man does that.”

“You were in the garage the whole time,” I said. “Every week. Four hours. In the cold.”

“I couldn’t come up,” he said. “I couldn’t sit in here and look at you, knowing I was going to hand you that slip on the way home.”

The lady in the next chair was awake now. I could tell, because she had gone very still. Becky was standing by the window pretending to read a monitor.

“Dad doesn’t know,” Tanner said. “Nobody knows but Jolene. I’ve been leaving the house every morning at six like I’m going to work. I drive around. I go to the library in Columbus and put in applications.”

“Almost three months,” I said.

“Almost three months.”

Becky has her say

She came back over with her clipboard, and she stood at the foot of my chair, and she looked at my son over the top of her clipboard.

“Mr. Brekke,” she said. “You are listed as your mother’s emergency contact. I want you to know what that means in this room. It means when she tries to drive herself home on a full dose of Benadryl, I call you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It means she is not supposed to come in here alone, scared out of her mind, after driving seventy miles in February. I have watched her in this chair for twelve weeks, and today is the first time I’ve seen her look like that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tanner said again. His ears had gone red, the way they did when he was a boy and the principal called.

“Whatever is going on in your family is not my business,” Becky said. “But she is my business. And she is not driving home today.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “She’s not. I’ll take her. I’ll take her every week. I’m not going to let her do this again.”

Becky looked at him a moment longer. Then she nodded once, like a woman marking something down, and she went to change the bag on my pole.

That was the consequence, if you want to know. Not money. Not a fight.

A nurse who had known his mother twelve weeks looking him in the eye in front of a room full of sick strangers and telling him the plain truth.