The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

Where Was Jeff

People always ask about my son. Where was Jeff in all this. It is the first thing Ray would have asked, God rest him, and he would have been right to.

Jeff drives a feed truck for the co-op, the route that runs the dairy farms up by the lake, and in October he is gone before light and home after dark six days a week. Harvest is his busy season same as everybody’s.

I called him that night, not to make trouble, just to hear him. He was tired in the way you can hear through a phone.

“Mom, I know,” he said. “She told me. I said the lane was fine. I grew up on that lane.” He let a breath out. “But she’s been planning this boo-barn thing for a month and the boys are wound up about it and I’m not home enough to fight about Halloween. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Don’t you be sorry,” I told him. “You’re feeding half the county’s cows. That’s a good man’s work.”

“I’ll walk the lane with the boys next year,” he said. “I promise. I’ll take a day.”

“I know you will,” I said, and I did know it. Jeff keeps his word the slow way, the way his father did, a season or two late but kept.

“She’s not trying to be unkind, Mom. She just wants them to have what the other kids have.”

“I never thought she was unkind,” I said, and that was true. “Go to bed. You sound like a man who’s been up since four.”

And it was. I was not going to put my boy in the middle of a thing between his wife and his mother. A marriage does not need a mother-in-law standing in the doorway with a grievance.

That is the thing people miss when they say just call him, just have him put his foot down. You can win the night and lose the house doing that. I wanted my grandsons to have a father who came home to peace.

So I did not fight. I hung up, and I washed my pie bowl, and I sat a while in the kitchen with the lane going dark outside, and I thought about what a woman does when she cannot change a thing but will not pretend it did not happen.