The Best Backer Upper in South Dakota

He told me. It was more than double what I made in a good week, and home every night, because he hauled local: bin corn from farms around the county to the ethanol plant down by Chancellor.

“You serious?” he asked me.

“I’ve never been more serious about anything,” I said, and I meant it.

He wrote his number on a sugar packet. If I had my Class A license by the end of April, he said, he had a seat for me when spring hauling started.

The technical college in Sioux Falls had a truck driving course. I looked it up that same night, after the kids were asleep, sitting on my bathroom floor so the light wouldn’t wake Lula.

Since 2022, the federal government requires entry-level driver training before you can sit for a Class A test: classroom hours on everything from air brakes to hours of service, plus real time behind the wheel.

The course cost more than I had ever had in the bank. But a state workforce grant paid for people changing careers into jobs the area needed, and truck drivers were at the top of the list.

The grant paid for my training. It did not pay for the skills test or the use of the college’s truck on test day. That was $1,000, and it was on me.

I started saving in November. Every five-dollar bill I got in tips went into a coffee can on top of my refrigerator. I took every extra shift Deb would give me.

By February I had my commercial learner’s permit. You pass the written tests at the driver exam station, then hold the permit at least fourteen days before you can test on the road.

By March I was in class three nights a week and behind the wheel on Saturdays. My mother kept the kids those Saturdays. She never once asked me how it went.

“Trucking,” she said, the first time I told her. She said it the way you say a word you found on the bottom of your shoe. “That’s no job for a mother, Nikki.”

“It’s local, Mom. I’d be home every night. It pays twice what I make now.”

“Your grandfather drove truck,” she said, and she turned back to the sink. That was the end of the conversation, and every conversation about it after that ended the same way.

My dad didn’t say much either way. He worked thirty-one years at the elevator in Hartford, and he has never been a man to put himself between my mother and something she has decided.

But the day I passed my air brake test, he came by with an old pressure gauge off a truck he’d worked on in the eighties. He set it on my table and didn’t explain it. I kept it on the windowsill.

The test date came through in early April. A Friday, eight o’clock, at the college’s range south of Sioux Falls. Mom said she’d take the kids. I wrote it on the calendar in red.

And then at 5:41 that Friday morning, she called.

There was no one else to call at six in the morning. My neighbor works nights at the meat plant and sleeps all day. The high school girl who sits for me had class. My sister was already packing.