The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

The first Sunday drive was the second Sunday in May.

We got the corn planted on the home 160 the first week of May, a good dry week, and the beans the week after. By that Sunday you could see the rows just coming through, little green stitches running out across the black ground all the way to the section line.

I went to pick Mom up after the eight o’clock Mass. I had washed the pickup. Lori made me. She said Mom would notice, and she did. First thing she said when I opened the door for her.

“You washed it.”

“Lori made me.”

“Lori’s a good girl.”

The dollar was on the dash. I had tucked it under the edge of the windshield, right above the radio, where the sun had already started to fade it a little.

Mom saw it and nodded once, and did not say anything about it, and I knew she was pleased.

What I did not expect was the Buick pulling into the yard behind us.

It was Cheryl’s car. Cheryl was driving. Kathy was in the passenger seat. Jim was in the back with a pillow behind him, because it was a Sunday and Sunday is his good day, the day farthest from Friday’s dialysis.

They pulled up next to my pickup and Cheryl rolled down her window.

“We heard there was a drive,” she said.

Mom looked at me. I looked at Mom.

“It’s my drive,” Mom said. “Marvin’s paying rent.”

“We know,” Kathy said. “We’re not here for the rent. We just haven’t been out on the home place since Dad died. Not really. Not the fields.”

That stopped me. It was true. Twenty years. The girls came home for Christmas and Easter and birthdays, and they sat in the house and ate and visited and drove back to Columbus and Seward. They had never once ridden out to the far side of the quarter since the funeral.

“Well, you’re not all fitting in the pickup,” I said.

“We’ll follow you,” Cheryl said.

“No, you won’t,” Mom said. “You’ll get in.”

So we did it Mom’s way, because there was no other way to do it.

Mom rode up front with me. Cheryl and Kathy squeezed in the back of the extended cab, which was never meant for two grown women, their knees up against the backs of our seats. Jim stayed in the Buick with the door open and the radio on, and said he’d wait for the second drive, and he’d take shotgun.

Dale had stayed home. Somebody had to, he said, and I think he was right. It was a drive for the Ohlsens.

I drove out the lane slow, past the windbreak I trim every fall. Past the old hog house that has not had hogs in it since 1994. Out onto the field road along the north edge, where Dad used to drive with the window down and his arm out, slapping the side of the truck when he liked what he saw.

Mom rolled down her window. The May air came in, cool and smelling like turned dirt and the lilacs by the house.

“Stop here,” she said, at the first rise.

I stopped. From that rise you can see the whole quarter falling away to the south, all the way down to the creek and the cottonwoods.

Mom sat there and looked. Nobody in the truck said a word.

“Your rows are straight,” she said finally.

“New planter,” I said. “It steers itself off the satellite. Does it for you.”