The Two Miles I Pushed My Son

The last half mile

By the time we reached the city limit sign there were people standing out front of the Casey’s, two women with coffee, who clapped. Not a crowd. This is not a story where a crowd formed. It was two women and a man pumping gas who took off his cap.

But Eli waved at them like they were a crowd, and that was enough.

My arms were shaking by then and my shirt was soaked through under my jacket and my hands had gone numb on the grips. The last half mile into town has a sidewalk, cracked and heaved up by tree roots, and I had to tip the chair back on its big wheels to get the front casters over every lip, and Eli rode it like a ride, leaning back, holding his tank.

We came up the front walk of the grade school at eight twenty, late, and his teacher, a young woman named Miss Pruitt, was standing at the door looking down the sidewalk like she had been told to watch for us, which I found out later she had, because by then half the county had heard.

“There’s my explorer,” she said to Eli, and she crouched down and admired the oatmeal can tank like it was real diving equipment, and she wheeled him in herself.

At the door Eli stopped her. He turned the chair around to look back at me.

“Mom,” he said. “Did you see? They all waved.”

“I saw, baby,” I said.

“I didn’t think anybody knew me,” he said.

And then Miss Pruitt wheeled him on into the warm, toward the gym where he was going to stand still and wait to be brought to life, and I stood on the sidewalk and cried where he could not see me, which is the only place a mother is allowed to do it.

Wednesday

Earl’s son had turned around in Ash Grove when he heard we had made it, so I never did use his barn van that Monday. But he called me that night to say it was mine to borrow any time, no notice, and he meant it, and I have borrowed it since.

Dave called from a truck stop in Oklahoma, where he had heard the whole thing secondhand from his mother before I could tell it to him myself, and he was quiet on the phone in the good way this time, the proud way, and he said, “You pushed him two miles,” and I said, “A little under,” and he laughed and then he was not laughing.

But the part I want you to have is Wednesday.

Wednesday afternoon the white van came up our drive. A man from the mobility shop drove it, with Chad following behind in the Buick. They had taken it in Tuesday on an emergency call, and Chad had put the three thousand two hundred dollars on a card I am fairly sure he is still paying down, and they had put in a new lift, not a patch, a new Braun with the same hand control, and the man showed me how the new one worked even though I already knew.

I ran the platform up and down three times just to hear it run right.

Chad did not come up on the porch. He stood by the Buick with his hands in his pockets.

“It’s done,” he said. “I’m sorry, Robin. I didn’t think.”