The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

How We Got Here

My mother died when I was eleven. For three years it was just my dad and me on the farm north of town. Then he married Lorene, and I was glad, because he laughed again.

She was fine to me, mostly. Not warm, but fine. She had two grown kids of her own, Kim and a son out in Omaha, and I understood I was a late add to her life and not the center of it.

I made my peace with that at fourteen. You do, when you are a motherless girl and a man you love is happy again.

The farm had come down my mother’s side, from her people, the ground my dad worked his whole life. I did not think about that then.

Lorene did. I would learn later she thought about little else.

My dad, Earl, passed four years ago. Heart, in the machine shed, between one row and the next. He was sixty-three.

I was the one who found him. I rode with him in the ambulance into Fremont, and Lorene met us at the hospital.

For one night in that waiting room we held each other and cried like family, because that night we were.

It did not last past the funeral. By the time the casseroles stopped coming, the lines were back, harder than before.

After the funeral the lines in the family got drawn quieter and harder, and I was slow to see where they fell.

Lorene kept the home place. That was right, it had been half hers. Dale and I farm the quarter my dad deeded me before he went, with our own barn and our own gravel lane, a mile and a half down the road.

I had told myself the distance was just distance.

But Lorene sent Kim’s kids birthday cards with twenty dollars folded inside. She sent Bo a card with a dollar store coloring book in it, and a note that said Love, Lorene, not Grandma.

I had told myself that was just how some women ration things out. Blood first, then the rest of us.

There was a Thanksgiving two years back that I should have read better. Lorene set the children’s table with name cards at every seat but Bo’s.

She said she had lost count, and I believed her, because believing her was easier than the other thing.

Dale found a folding chair and I squeezed my boy in next to me at the grown-ups’ end. He was six.

He ate his pie and watched Tyler and Maddie at their little table with the paper turkeys, and he did not say one word, and I let it go.

What she said on the courthouse lawn was not rationing. It was a door, and she shut it on my son in front of half the town.

Bo is not her blood. That is true and it was always true. What was new was that she had decided to hang a sign on it where a child could read it.

I kept hearing him in my head. It’s okay, Mom. I don’t have to. Eight years old and already learning to make himself smaller so a grown woman would not have to feel bad.

That was the thing I could not forgive. Not the race. The lesson she was trying to teach him about his own worth.