The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? Vans break. Ramp motors break. I folded Mom’s wheelchair into the back of my pickup on Thursday afternoon, and I lifted her into the passenger seat myself, and I drove her home.

So that is where we were. Ten to four on a September afternoon, the sun still warm, the cottonwoods along the street just starting to turn.

My mother in the passenger seat in her pink cardigan, waiting for an answer about her van.

I got out and walked up the drive. Rick did not move from beside the boat.

Up close it was even shinier, the kind of boat you see in the magazines at the bait shop, with the trolling motor on the bow and the seats still wrapped.

“Rick,” I said. “Where’s the van?”

He looked at the gravel. He looked at the boat. Then he looked past me at Mom, sitting in my truck with the window down, and his face did something I had never seen it do.

“I sold it,” he said. “I sold it, Deb.” He said it loud enough for her to hear, and I give him that much. He did not make me carry it to her.

“When?” I asked.

“Third week she was down there.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Took it up to the dealer in Grand Island. They gave me fifteen-five for it.”

“And the ramp?”

“I didn’t get to it.” He said it to the ground. “I was going to. I didn’t.”

I want to tell you I thought of something smart to say. I didn’t.

I stood there in my work shirt with the co-op patch on it, and I did the math in my head, and I understood that the money from my mother’s van was sitting in front of me with a trolling motor on it.

People have asked me since why I didn’t call the sheriff. The answer is simple, and it is the worst part.

The title said “Debbie or Rick.” His name alone was enough to sell it. There was nothing to report.

There was nobody to call and no form to file. There was only a man to face, and the man was standing three feet from me, and my mother was sitting in a truck at the curb waiting to go into her own house.

Mom’s house is a small white ranch on a quiet residential street, the same house I was born into.

It sits up a little from the yard, and the front door is up three concrete steps with no rail on either side.

Three steps. That’s all it is. I have walked up them ten thousand times without thinking.

I have taken them two at a time with a basketball under my arm and one at a time carrying Christmas presents.

My mother could not do one of them. Not in September. Maybe not by spring.

Kim had been very clear about that, and I had heard her say it, and so had Rick, because I had put her on speakerphone for him.

There was a back door, but it had two steps of its own and a narrow landing. There was no ramp anywhere.

There was no van to sit in while we figured it out. There was just my truck and those steps.

I could have gone and gotten the wheelchair out of the bed and wheeled her to the bottom step and then what.