The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

“Water,” she said. “Could I have a glass of water, honey? From the tap. Not that hospital stuff in the little cups.”

I got her water. I got her the remote and her reading glasses and the cordless phone, and I put a pillow under her bad arm the way the occupational therapist had shown me.

I did all of it slowly, because I was afraid of what I’d do if I went back outside too fast.

“Don’t you yell at him,” Mom said, with her eyes still shut. “Cole. Look at me. Don’t you yell at him in the driveway in front of the Wiebes.”

“I’m not going to yell,” I said.

“I know you,” she said. “You don’t yell. You get quiet. Quiet is worse. Just don’t do anything you can’t take back.”

I promised her. Then I went back out through the front door and stood on the top step and looked down at my stepfather, who was still standing by that boat with his hands in his windbreaker pockets.

“Cole,” Rick said. “I can explain.”

The terrible thing is that I believed him. I knew he could.

Rick always had a reason for everything, and his reasons usually made sense, and I had spent eighteen years trusting them.

“Go ahead,” I said. I did not come down the steps. I did not raise my voice. I just stood there where I’d set my mother down and waited.

He took his cap off and turned it in his hands. He had a band of white skin across his forehead where the cap sat, and it made him look older than I had ever seen him.

“The bills started coming the second week,” he said. “Big envelopes. One of them said a hundred and forty thousand dollars, Cole. A hundred and forty thousand. For the hospital part alone.”

“Insurance pays most of that,” I said.

“I know that now.” He swallowed. “I didn’t know it then. They all say ‘this is not a bill’ up at the top and then they’ve got these numbers on them like a house payment. I’d sit at that kitchen table at midnight and add them up.”

I knew those envelopes. I’d seen a stack of them on the counter and had not opened a single one, because I was busy driving to Kearney.

I had left Rick alone with them, and I had not thought once about what that would do to him.

“I thought we were going to lose the house,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to go back to work at sixty-one and there’s no work for a sixty-one-year-old man in this town but sweeping somebody’s floor.”

“So you sold her van,” I said.

“I told myself she’d never ride in it.” He said it fast, like he’d been practicing it, or like he’d been trying not to say it for a month. “That week, she couldn’t hold her head up straight. She couldn’t say my name. I told myself she wasn’t coming home, not really. Not to need a van.”

I didn’t say anything. Across the street, Hank had not moved.

“And then I had fifteen thousand dollars in my hand,” Rick went on, “and I drove past the boat place on the way out of Grand Island, and I just. I pulled in. I’ve wanted a boat like that for thirty years, Cole. Thirty years. Since before I knew your mother.”