The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

Becca and Shane had Ava’s insurance through Shane’s job at the farm co-op feed mill in Brookfield. It covered some of the therapy.

It didn’t cover all of it. Shane sat at my table with a pencil and figured the gap came to about five hundred a month.

My husband Dale died four years ago this June. He worked thirty-one years for the railroad out of Marceline, and what I have now is his survivor check and my bus pay.

Five hundred dollars a month is real money to me. It was the cable, the new tires and the trip I’d meant to take to see my sister in Joplin.

I gave it gladly. I want that understood. I would have given it if it had been twice that.

“I’ll handle the appointments,” Shane said that first Sunday. “The mill lets me start early and leave early. Becca’s got enough on her. You two don’t worry about a thing.”

He was thirty-two then. A big, quiet man with a sunburned neck and a Ram pickup he kept cleaner than his kitchen.

He had always been good to Becca, as far as I could see. He called me Patti, not Mom, and I liked that he never pretended.

“Miss Jill says she’s doing great,” he’d tell me every couple of months, at Sunday dinner, while he reached for the potatoes. “Says these things take time.”

And I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? Ava was still stuttering, but the woman who tested her had said it would take time.

I had no reason in the world to think a man would sit at my table and eat my roast and lie to me about his own little girl.

The next morning Ava climbed onto my bus at 6:52, the way she always did, her backpack nearly as big as she was.

She sat in the first seat on the right, where I can see her in the mirror without turning my head.

I waited until we were out past the Henley place, where the road is straight for two miles and there’s nothing to watch but fence posts and pasture.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “what’s Miss Jill’s room like? Does she have a lot of toys?”

In the mirror I watched her think about it. She has her mother’s habit of chewing the inside of her cheek. “Wh, wh, wh,” she said, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and I waited, the way I’d learned to wait. “Who’s M, Miss Jill?”

I drove another quarter mile before I trusted my voice. “Nobody, honey. Grandma got mixed up. I was thinking of somebody else.”

Becca gets a thirty-minute break at the nursing home at ten. I finished my morning route at 8:15, went home and sat in my kitchen for an hour with my coffee going cold, and then I drove to Brookfield.

She came out the side door by the dumpsters in her work shoes, already looking at her phone, and when she saw my face she put it in her pocket.

“Is it Ava?” she said. “Is she sick?”

“She’s fine. She’s at school. Sit down with me a minute.”

We sat on the curb there, in the shade of the building. I told her what Mrs. Harmon told me.

I told her what Ava said on the bus. I said it as plainly as I could and I didn’t put anything extra on it.