Dale slowed the Ford to a stop. He did not say anything either. He just let it idle.
And Mason, eight years old, who does not know one thing about workdays or lists or who is owed what, looked up at his mother and said, “Can we get on.”
I have turned that moment over a hundred times. I could have said a lot of things. I had a few of them ready, if I am honest, saved up from standing at that welcome table with the crossed-off list in my hand.
I did not say any of them. I looked at Ella, my keeper of the ride, and Ella looked at me, and I gave her the smallest nod, and my nine-year-old daughter leaned over the oak rail her great-grandfather built and put her hand down to her cousin.
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“Come on,” Ella said. “There’s room. There’s always room.”
Mason took her hand and climbed up. The Aho dad lifted Grace up over the rail and set her down in the straw, and the other kids scooched to make the space that was already there, and that was it. Nobody said a word about any of it. Twenty-three now. Ella recounted and told me so.
Roberta stayed on the shoulder. I stopped beside her while the wagon idled. I did not gloat. Ruth from church was in my head and so was my grandmother and so, I think, was Lon.
“It’s cold,” I said to her. “There’s cider up at the house when we get in. Diane made a roaster of it.”
Roberta’s chin was doing something. She kept her eyes on the wagon, on her two kids gone down into the straw with all the rest, laughing, already belonging.
“I crossed them off over a Saturday,” she said. Her voice was not the welcome-table voice. “You were in Rochester with your mother, and I crossed your two off over a Saturday they could not help.”
“You did,” I said. I was not going to make it not true.
“I don’t know why I get like that about that ride,” she said. “It’s the one thing that’s mine to run. I guard it like it’s the ark of the covenant and it’s a wagon full of straw.”
“It’s a good thing you run,” I said. “You’ve run it eleven years. You just forgot for a minute it was supposed to be a gift.”
She nodded. She wiped her face with the back of her glove, quick, the way you do when you do not want it counted as crying.
“Get in the car and follow us up,” I said. “The ride’s almost done. Have some cider. The kids won’t even know anything was ever wrong, and that’s how I want it.”