The Card of Thanks in the County Paper

Before the bills

I should tell you who Sherri is, because she is not a cartoon, and I will not write her like one.

My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was eleven. She was diagnosed in March and gone by October, and after that it was my dad and me in a farmhouse outside Sheldon that got very quiet very fast.

Dad drove a grain truck for the co-op back then. He did his best. We ate a lot of frozen pizza and whatever the church ladies brought by in foil pans.

He met Sherri when I was thirteen. She worked the motor vehicle counter at the county treasurer’s office, and Dad went in to renew the plates on his pickup and came back an hour later than he should have, whistling.

I remember that whistling. I had not heard it in two years.

They got married at the courthouse the next spring. It was a Tuesday. There were six of us there, counting the judge’s clerk who signed as witness.

I was fourteen and I did not make it easy for her. I did not have to be mean to be hard to live with.

I just went to my room a lot and answered in one word.

Sherri drove me to every wrestling meet anyway. Every single one, from my freshman year to my senior year, across half of northwest Iowa in a Buick with a heater that only worked on high.

She sat in the top row of the bleachers with a seat cushion and a thermos and yelled my name louder than anybody’s mother.

When I broke my wrist my junior year, she was the one who sat with me in the emergency room in Sheldon until two in the morning, because Dad was hauling corn to Sioux City and could not get back.

She bought me a candy bar from the machine and did not tell me to stop crying.

So when I say my stepmother did something to us that was wrong, understand that I have also eaten about two thousand of her packed lunches.

Both things are true. I have had to hold them both at once for most of my life.

What I did not know about her, until that summer, was how she had gotten married the first time.

I will come back to that. She told me herself, in my own kitchen, and I would rather let her tell it.