The Corn We Sold Off Our Own Tailgate

I sat down on the top step then, because my legs did not want to hold me up and because I did not want this to be a thing I was standing over her for.

“They’re children,” I said. “They got up at five o’clock in the morning. All summer.”

“I got up at five for forty years,” she said. “Nobody put my money in a can for me.”

And there it was. She felt owed.

Somewhere in her head the stand had been a thing she handed down to us.

And when she drove past that night and saw the can filling up on my windowsill through the kitchen glass, she decided the handing had gone the wrong direction.

That she had been carrying this whole family for years, and it was past time the family carried her a little, and the corn money was simply the first time the books had a number she could reach.

I could have told her she was wrong about the carrying. I could have listed the casseroles and the rides to the eye doctor in Iowa City for her cataracts.

I could have named every winter night Jeff drove over at eleven to light her furnace when it kicked out, in his coveralls over his pajamas, and never once mentioned it to her after.

I did not. You do not win that one. You just end up two women keeping books against each other on a porch, and both of you come away poorer than you sat down.

“Okay,” I said, and I stood up. “Okay, Dean.”

I never called her Dean. In thirty years it had always been Mom, or Grandma to the kids. It came out of me flat, before I could catch it, and I saw it land on her like a slap.

I drove home and I did not let myself cry until I was past the grain elevator where nobody on the road could see into the truck.