The Best Backer Upper in South Dakota

She looked at me. She opened her mouth to say something, and then she closed it again.

“It’s local hauling, Mom. Grain. I’ll be home every night by supper. It pays more than twice what I make at the cafe. I’ll be on county roads between the bins and Chancellor.”

“I thought,” Mom said, and her voice cracked, which my mother’s voice does not do, “I thought if you missed it, you’d stay at the cafe. And you’d be close. And the kids would be close.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you did.”

She didn’t apologize. Not that night. My mother is a proud woman, raised by a proud woman, and she got up and put her coat on and said she needed to walk the dogs.

Dad watched her go. Then he slid the license back across the table to me.

“Your grandpa would’ve liked you,” he said. “He’d have liked your straight line.”

“How do you know it was straight?”

“I don’t,” he said. “But I know you.”

Lula walked up to the table, climbed into his lap without being invited, and told him I was the best backer-upper. He said he’d heard that about me.

Mom came back from walking the dogs in time to hug the kids goodbye. She did not hug me. But she stood at the door a long time while I buckled them in.

On Saturday morning, I worked my shift at the cafe. I had two weeks of notice to give Deb, and Deb had told me she’d take every hour I had left.

What I didn’t know was that Mrs. Ostby had taken a picture.

She had taken one picture on her phone from behind my kids: three little backs, three paper cups, and the red truck in the distance with the trailer coming through the cones.

The college posted it on its Facebook page Friday afternoon. The words under it said: “Three of our biggest fans this morning, cheering their mom through her backing. Congratulations to our newest Class A driver.”

By Saturday morning, every single person in the Hartford cafe had seen it.

The regulars at the counter clapped when I walked in. Old men in seed caps who had never said more than “coffee, black” to me stood up from their stools.

At a quarter after eight, my parents came in for their Saturday breakfast and sat in their booth by the window, second from the end.

I poured their coffee like always. I didn’t say anything about Friday. I didn’t have to.

The farmer in the next booth had known my mother since high school. “Marj,” he said, friendly as anything, “I saw those grandkids on the college page. Where were you?”

My mother said Kim needed her for the dogs.

“For the dogs,” he said. He didn’t say anything else. He just said it again, slower, like he was turning it over to see if it would sound better the second time. “For the dogs.”

Two women from the church circle stopped at their booth on the way out. One said the kids looked so proud. The other asked which grandchild held the clipboard.

By the time they paid, my mother had heard about the dogs from the whole cafe. Nobody was unkind to her. Nobody had to be. In a small town, everybody knows who was at the window and who wasn’t.