The Noon Pickup That Brought Grandma Back

June

By June, I was running on fumes.

The shuttle trains were coming two and three a week. We loaded out corn until the bins rang hollow, and then we started cleaning them out for the fall crop. The dust was everywhere and the days were long.

I had stopped seeing my friends. I fell asleep in church twice. I fell asleep at the kitchen table once with a fork still in my hand, and woke up at nine at night with the lights on.

One morning I was walking the top of a railcar and I caught my boot on a hatch cover and went down on one knee. It wasn’t a bad fall. But Dale saw it from the ground.

He was waiting for me at the bottom of the ladder.

“That’s what I was talking about,” he said.

“I’m fine, Dale.”

“You’re not fine. You’re gray,” he said. “You look like the dust.”

I didn’t argue. He was right.

“You go sit in your truck for half an hour before you drive across town,” Dale said. “Every day. I don’t care if you clock out at 11:30. You don’t drive to that daycare on no sleep.”

So that’s what I started doing. I’d clock out a little early, drive over to Little Acorns, and park in the back corner of the lot under the cottonwood.

Then I’d tip my seed cap down over my eyes, lean my head against the window, and sleep until my phone alarm went off at 12:03.

Twenty minutes, sometimes thirty. It’s amazing what thirty minutes in a hot truck will do for a man who got up at three.

The knock

It was a Thursday in the middle of June. I know because it was the day before my weekend, and I remember thinking in my sleep about taking Gage to the swimming pool in Marshall.

I woke up to knuckles on the glass.

I jerked up so fast my cap fell into my lap. For a second I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw the cottonwood, and the fence, and Kara standing at my window.

She had a brown paper sack in her hand. Gage’s name was on it in marker.

I rolled the window down. Neither of us said anything for a second.

“He left his lunch in my car,” she said finally. “I was on my lunch break. I was bringing it over.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

She looked at me. Then she looked past me, at the dashboard. The clock said 11:52.

“How long have you been sitting here?” she asked.

“Since about 11:30.”

“Asleep?”

“Dale makes me,” I said. “I fell on a railcar a couple weeks ago. He doesn’t want me driving tired.”

Kara’s face changed. Not a lot. Just a little, around the eyes.

“What time did you get up this morning?” she asked.

“Quarter after three.”

“Every day?”

“Every day since April.”

She stood there in the sun holding that paper sack, and for a long time she didn’t say anything at all. I could hear the kids in the play yard behind her, and a lawn mower somewhere, and a train blowing for the crossing out on the highway.

Then she said, “Lori told me you haven’t missed once.”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”