The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

I could have called around for a portable ramp and left her sitting at the curb for an hour while I drove to Kearney and back.

I looked across the street. Hank Wiebe and his wife, Joan, were standing on their porch.

Hank is seventy, a retired farmer who sold his cattle and moved to town eight years ago, and he has never once in eight years missed anything that happens on this street.

Joan had her hand over her mouth. Hank had his arms folded.

They were not pretending not to look, and I was grateful for that, strangely. Pretending would have been worse.

I went back to the truck and opened Mom’s door. She had been crying without making any noise, which is a thing she taught herself to do when I was little and money was bad and she didn’t want me to hear.

“Mom,” I said. “I’m going to carry you in. Put your good arm around my neck.”

“Cole, no.” She shook her head. “The whole street’s looking. I’m not a sack of feed, honey.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “Put your arm around my neck anyway.”

I slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, the way the therapists had shown me for transfers, and I lifted her out of that truck.

She came up too easy. That scared me more than the boat did.

She had weighed maybe a hundred and forty pounds at the Fourth of July picnic.

In my arms she felt like a hundred and ten. Six weeks of hospital food and therapy and fear had taken it right off her.

I carried her up the drive, past the bass boat, past Rick. I did not look at him.

I kept my eyes on the steps, because I climb poles for a living and I know better than anybody that you look where your feet are going.

First step. She pressed her face into my shoulder so she wouldn’t have to see the porch across the street. I felt her breath, warm and fast, through my shirt.

Second step. Her arm tightened around my neck, and I could smell the hospital soap still in her cardigan, that thin clean smell that never quite washes out of anything.

Third step. I stopped on the top step, at the front door, and I shifted her a little so I could reach the handle.

And she said something into my collar so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it.

“You were nine pounds,” she said. “Nine pounds and four ounces. I carried you up these same steps the day we brought you home from the hospital in Kearney.”

I stood there on the top step with my hand on the door handle and couldn’t open it. I couldn’t see.

I just held my mother on her own front porch until my eyes cleared enough to find the knob.

“I remember,” she said. “It was September then too. Your dad had the car running. I wouldn’t let him carry you. I wanted to do it myself.”

“I’ve got you,” I said. That was all I could get out. “I’ve got you, Mom.”

I carried her through the living room and set her down in her own recliner, the brown one with the afghan Grandma crocheted over the back.

She sank into it and closed her eyes and let out a long breath, like she’d been holding it since Kearney.