My mother called at 5:41 in the morning, and I knew before I picked up. Nobody calls a waitress at 5:41 with good news. Good news waits until after the breakfast rush.
I was standing at my kitchen counter in my socks with three lunches lined up in a row, the crusts already cut off Lula’s, because she is four and has opinions.
“Nikki,” Mom said. “Kim’s got that wedding up in Brookings this weekend. Her friend from nursing school. She’s leaving this morning for the rehearsal, and she needs us to keep the dogs.”
I set down the butter knife. I remember that clearly, because I set it down very carefully, the way you set something down when you are afraid you might throw it.
“Mom, today is the test. You know today is the test. You said you’d have the kids at your place by six thirty. We talked about it Sunday. We talked about it Wednesday.”
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“I know what we talked about. But Kim can’t take two dogs to a wedding, and she can’t leave them alone for three days. The big one chews when he’s anxious.”
“Then keep the dogs and the kids. Your house has a fenced yard. The kids love those dogs.”
There was a pause on the line, and in the pause I heard my father breathe. He was on the other phone, the old cordless in the den. He didn’t say a word.
“Two dogs and three kids is too much for us, Nikki,” Mom said. “We’re not as young as we were. Dogs can’t be left alone. Kids can go anywhere. You’ll figure something out. You always do.”
Then she said she loved me, and she hung up, and I stood in my kitchen with three lunches and a test slot at eight o’clock sharp, forty minutes south of my front door.
I want to be fair about this. My mother is not a cruel woman. She makes pies for every funeral in Hartford, and she drove me to every volleyball practice for four years.
But she did not want me to take that test. I knew it, and she knew I knew it, and neither one of us had ever said it out loud.
I was thirty-two, with three kids, a rented duplex in Hartford, and a job pouring coffee at the cafe on Main Street, where my parents had eaten breakfast every Saturday since before I was born.
Their dad lives in Rapid City. He sends money when he remembers, which is about every third month. I stopped being angry about it a long time ago. Angry costs gas money.
Waitressing is honest work, and I was good at it. But the tips run thin in January, and the cafe had cut my hours twice since Christmas.
Last fall a man named Rick Halvorson came in for pie. He runs a small grain trucking outfit out of a yard near Humboldt, and he told Deb, who owns the cafe, he could not find drivers.
“I’d put a woman in a truck tomorrow,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Anybody with a Class A and a pulse who shows up on time.”
I refilled his coffee and asked him what it paid.