The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

The pen

I picked up the twelve slips from the side table. I unfolded the paper and laid the twelve slips in my lap, one on top of the other.

Then I took the blue co-op pen out of my purse.

My hand was not steady, with the Benadryl in me, but I have been writing on invoices for thirty-one years and I can do it in my sleep.

Across the first slip, I wrote: Paid. Then my initials, L.B., and the date of that first Tuesday, the way I did on every invoice at the co-op that ever went through my hands.

Tanner watched me do it. He did not say anything. I did all twelve, one after another, and every one of them said the same thing, in my handwriting, under his square printing.

Then I took my checkbook out of my purse. I wrote a check to Tanner Brekke for four hundred and eighty dollars. On the memo line I wrote: For your truck.

I put the check on top of the twelve slips and I held the whole stack out to him.

“Mom, no,” he said. “No. I’m not taking that. I’m giving you back every dime. I’ll pay you back the four-eighty, I swear I will, as soon as I get on somewhere.”

“You’ll take it,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“Tanner Dale Brekke,” I said, and I used his middle name, which I had not done since he was in high school. “Look at me.”

He looked at me.

“Every one of those slips is paid,” I said. “Paid in full. That’s what that word means. I’ve been marking it on paper my whole life, and I know what it means. Nobody owes anybody anything on those.”

“Mom.”

“And this check is not for the rides. This check is for your truck. That squeal is your serpentine belt, and that knock is going to be something worse if you don’t get it looked at. Your father would tell you the same.”

He laughed, then. It came out of him sideways, half a sob. “It’s the idler pulley,” he said. “I know what it is. I just couldn’t buy the part.”

“Then buy the part.”

He took the stack out of my hand. He looked at the top slip, at my handwriting across his, and he held it the way you hold something that might break.

Then he put his head down on the arm of my chair, right on my gray wrap, and he cried.

My grown son, thirty-six years old, in his work jacket, in the infusion room of a cancer center in Omaha.

I put my hand on the back of his head. His hair is thick like his father’s.

I just kept my hand there, and I did not say anything, and the drip went on dripping, one drop and then the next.

The lady in the next chair handed Becky a tissue to bring over. Becky brought the whole box.