The Best Backer Upper in South Dakota

I did not say one word about it. I want that on the record. I refilled her coffee twice and brought her the extra butter she likes and told her to have a good day.

When she left, she put a twenty on the table for a nine-dollar breakfast. She had never tipped me more than two dollars in her life.

My first day hauling for Rick Halvorson was the next Monday.

I set my alarm for 4:15. The high school girl was coming at five to get the kids on the bus and Lula to daycare, which I would figure out how to pay for later.

At 4:50, there was a knock on my duplex door.

It was my mother. She had her coat on and her purse on her arm and a casserole dish under a dish towel.

“I’ll keep them,” she said, before I could say a word. “Today. And the rest of the week, if you want. Call your sitter and tell her she can sleep in.”

I stood there in my sock feet.

“Mom, I didn’t ask you.”

“I know you didn’t ask,” she said. “That’s why I came.”

She put the casserole in the refrigerator, looked at the three lunches on the counter, picked up the butter knife and started cutting the crusts off Lula’s.

I called the sitter. I told her to sleep in.

At the yard near Humboldt, the sky was just starting to go pink in the east. Rick had my truck ready: a tractor with a forty-foot hopper-bottom grain trailer, empty, the tarp rolled tight.

And leaning against the fender of it, in his old canvas chore coat and his elevator cap, was my father.

I parked my car and got out slowly.

“Dad?”

“Rick says it’s all right if I ride along,” he said. “Long as I sign the rider form and keep my hands off the radio.” He held up a folded piece of paper. “I signed it.”

Rick came out of the shop wiping his hands. “Your dad called me Saturday night,” he said. “I told him his daughter was the driver, so it was up to her.”

Dad looked at me. “Is it up to you?”

I had to look at the ground for a second. Then I looked back up.

“Get in,” I said. “But you don’t get to tell me how to back it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and he climbed up into the passenger seat with a grunt, and set his thermos between his boots.

We hauled bin corn all day, three loads from a farm north of Hartford to the plant at Chancellor. Dad knew every farm we passed and who had married into it.

He did not tell me how to drive. Not once. When I backed up to the bin auger for the second load, he kept his eyes on his mirror and didn’t say a word until I set the brake.

“Huh,” he said. That was all. From my father, that is a parade.

Around noon, between the second load and the third, I pulled into the gravel lot behind the cafe on Main. I wanted a sandwich, and I wanted Deb to see the truck.