The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

She found a used one at a mobility dealer in Grand Island. It was a silver minivan with a fold-out ramp on the side and a lowered floor.

It had sixty-one thousand miles on it, and it cost eighteen thousand dollars.

She paid for it out of her own savings. Twenty-two years of cafeteria paychecks, a little at a time, in an account at the bank in town that she called her rainy day money.

There had been about twenty-one thousand in it. After the van there was about three.

“It’s raining,” she said, when I asked if she was sure. She tried to smile, and half her face did. “This is what I saved it for, honey. I just didn’t know it.”

I drove up to Grand Island on my day off and drove the van home.

The title paperwork came through the county treasurer’s office, and Mom had me ask the clerk to put Rick on it too.

“Debbie or Rick,” the title read when it came. The clerk explained it to me at the counter, how the word “or” meant either one of them could sign it over without the other. Mom had wanted it that way on purpose.

“In case something happens to me,” she said, when I brought her the copy. “So Rick isn’t stuck with a van he can’t sell. I don’t want him stuck with anything.”

I remember thinking that was just like her. Sitting in a hospital bed, planning around her own death, and her main worry was that somebody else might be put out.

Rick did not come down to Kearney as much as I did.

He came on Sundays, mostly, and sat in the chair by the window and watched whatever game was on and patted her hand at the commercials.

I told myself that was just Rick. He was sixty-one and had retired that spring from the grain elevator after thirty-four years, the last twenty as foreman.

He was a man who fixed augers and ran crews. Hospital rooms made him small and quiet.

He married my mother when I was twelve. My own dad left when I was four and did not keep in touch, and for a long time I did not want anything to do with a new one. Rick waited me out.

He taught me to tie a jig the right way, with the knot that doesn’t slip.

He taught me to drive a stick shift in the elevator lot on Sunday afternoons when it was empty, and he never once yelled when I killed the engine.

He came to every one of my wrestling meets. When I got my lineman’s certificate at the community college, he was the one who cried, not Mom.

So when I say what he did next, I want you to know who he was before it.

Two days before discharge, I called Rick from the parking lot of the hospital. I said I would take off work Thursday and help him bring Mom home in the van.

I asked if he had picked up the rental ramp from the medical supply yet.

There was a pause on the line. I remember a combine going by on the highway behind me, loud enough that I almost missed what he said.

“Van’s in the shop,” he said. “Something with the ramp motor. You’d better just bring her in your truck. I’ll have the ramp figured out.”