Mom had agreed to try. She really had. She kept him busy in the afternoons, took him out to see the neighbor’s goats, let him help her fold towels, read him the same tractor book nine times running.
“But Jesse, he was falling over,” she said. “He was face down in the carpet at two o’clock with a crayon in his hand. He was four years old and he was tired.”
So she had put him on the couch with the afghan Grandma Kowalski crocheted, and he was asleep before she got it over his feet.
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That was the afternoon Kara got off work early.
She came in, saw Gage asleep on the couch, and stood there in the doorway with her car keys still in her hand. Mom said she didn’t yell. She just said, “I asked you for one thing.”
Then she woke him up, put his shoes on him while he was still crying, and carried him out to her car.
That night, at 8:40, Mom’s phone buzzed with a text. She showed it to me. She had not deleted it. I don’t think my mother has ever deleted anything.
It said: We won’t need you after Friday. Thank you for everything.
“Thank you for everything,” Mom said. “Like I was the lady who came to clean the gutters.”
I read the text twice. Then I put her phone face down on the table, because I didn’t want her looking at it again.
My dad came in from the garage then, wiping his hands on a shop rag. Stan Kowalski drove a plow and a road grader for Lyon County for thirty-one years. He is not a man who wastes words, and he did not waste any now.
He looked at the envelope, looked at Mom, and looked at me.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, which was the truth.
He nodded like that was a fair answer. Then he put his hand on Mom’s shoulder, left it there a second, and went to the sink to wash up.