The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

The man in the cafeteria

My treatment finished at a quarter to one. Becky flushed my port and unhooked me and made me sit for fifteen minutes with a cup of apple juice before she would let me stand.

Tanner helped me into my wrap. He picked up my keys from the side table and put them in his own jacket pocket, and nobody said a word about that.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said in the elevator. “Two vehicles. Your Buick’s on three, and my truck’s on five. I’m not leaving your car here, but I’m not letting you drive it either.”

I was too foggy to work it out. Then the elevator opened on the first floor, and there was Merle.

He was sitting at a little table in the cafeteria across from the elevators, in his barn coat and his seed cap, with a cup of coffee in front of him that had gone cold a long time ago.

He stood up when he saw us. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had been waiting for exactly this.

“Merle,” I said. “What on earth.”

“Thought you might need a ride home,” he said. “Or somebody to drive that Buick, anyhow.”

I stood there with my hand on Tanner’s arm and I put it together, the light in his kitchen at five in the morning, the headlights a quarter mile back the whole way, stopping when I stopped at the light in Fremont.

“That was you,” I said. “Behind me. The whole way.”

Merle turned his cap around once in his hands. “June would’ve had my hide if I let you drive to Omaha by yourself in February,” he said.

“Seventy miles. Somebody had to be back there in case you went in the ditch.”

“Merle, your eyes.”

“My eyes are fine for following a maroon Buick at forty-five miles an hour,” he said. “You drive like a Lutheran. It wasn’t hard.”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down in his chair.

He had been sitting in that cafeteria for six hours. He had not come up, because he did not want me to know.

Tanner looked at Merle for a long moment. Then he put out his hand, and Merle shook it, and Tanner said, “Thank you for doing what I should have been doing.”

Merle held onto his hand a little longer than a handshake. “You’re here now, son,” he said. “That’s what counts.”

So that is how we went home. Merle drove my Buick, slow and steady in the right lane.

Tanner drove me in his truck, squealing, right behind him, and I slept against the window most of the way with Tanner’s jacket over me.

Telling Dale

Tanner called his father that night from my kitchen. I did not make him.

He asked me for the number of Dale’s dispatch so he could find out where his dad was parked, and he called him at nine, when Dale always calls me.

He told Dale all of it. The layoff, the slips, the twelve Tuesdays, the forty dollars.

He did not leave out the part where his mother drove herself to Omaha, and he did not make himself look any better than he was.

Then there was a long quiet, and I heard Tanner say, “Yes, sir,” and then, “I know it,” and then, “I know, Dad. I know.”

I found out later what Dale said. He said, “Son, you should have called me the day they let you go. That’s what I’m for. Not just for your mother. For you too.”

And then Dale, being Dale, said, “Now. The company’s shop in Grand Island has been short a diesel mechanic since Thanksgiving. I’m going to call my terminal manager in the morning. You have your tools?”

Tanner had his tools. He had never sold them, not even in January. He drove to Grand Island the next Monday for the interview, with a new idler pulley on his truck, and they hired him on the spot.

But he asked them for one thing when they hired him. He asked for Tuesdays off until his mother was done with chemo.

And they gave it to him, because Dale’s terminal manager is a man whose own wife had cancer.