The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

And the man sitting at my table had already sold his truck and told his wife and sat on a kitchen floor and cried. Whatever I could have said, he had already said worse to himself.

“You’ll pay it back,” I said. “Two-fifty a month is fine. And you’ll bring it yourself, on the first Sunday, at dinner. Same as I did.”

He looked up.

“And I’m still driving her,” I said. “Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s mine. I’m not giving that up for anybody, and I mean anybody.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But school’s out in two weeks,” I said. “And Miss Jill wants to keep going all summer. And the summer drive gets awful long with nobody to talk to but the radio.”

He didn’t understand at first. Then he did, and he put his hand over his eyes.

“On your days off,” I said, “you can ride in the back seat next to her. If she’ll have you. She’s the one who decides. Not me.”

She had him. Of course she had him. Children forgive faster than any of us deserve. That’s the most humbling thing I know about them.

The road crew works four tens, so Shane had most Fridays and some Thursdays off.

The first Thursday in June he folded himself into the back of my old silver minivan, next to the booster seat, with his knees up around his ears, and Ava read him her whole picture book about a pig who wanted to fly.

She stuck on some words. He didn’t finish a single one of them for her. I watched him in the mirror, sitting on his hands to keep from it, and I thought, well, somebody told him.

Becca told him, or Miss Jill did, when he went in with us that first day and shook her hand and apologized to her too.

The state’s insurance for kids came through the second week of June, and it did pay back to the day Becca applied. Donna called me herself to tell me.

She said she’d been hoping for it, and that she’d put a sticker on Ava’s file. A gold star, she said. I believe her.

Shane brings his envelope on the first Sunday. He sets it on the table by my plate before we eat, and I put it in the drawer by the phone without opening it, and neither one of us says a word about it.

By my count he’s got thirty-some more to go. I expect he’ll make every one.

It was a Tuesday in late July, just me and Ava, coming home from Chillicothe in the heat with the windows down because the air in that van is more of an idea than a fact.

The corn was up past the fence posts. The pastures were still green from a wet June.

We came up on the Henley place, where Bill Henley runs his Angus on the creek bottom.

There must have been forty head of them out there, black as stovepipes, and every last one of them was lying down in the grass.

Ava sat up in her booster seat and looked out the window for a long time. I saw her in the mirror, thinking. Chewing the inside of her cheek, like her mother.

Then she let a little breath out, like fogging a window, and she said the first sentence of her very own that I ever heard her say all the way through without stopping.

“Grandma, all the black cows are lying down in the grass, so Grandpa would say it’s going to rain.”