The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

The Drive Home

Bo did not cry in the truck. He looked out the window at the picked cornfields going by brown and flat.

He held the little paper number they never pinned on him and folded it smaller and smaller until it was the size of a stamp.

“Tyler got my spot,” he said, once. Not mad, just working it out loud. “Because he’s really family.”

“That is not what family means,” I said. My hands were tight on the wheel.

“Then what does it mean?” he asked.

I did not have a clean answer ready, and that shamed me more than anything Lorene had said all morning.

I could have turned the truck around. I could have walked back up to that card table and made a scene in front of God and the Methodist women.

I could have let Lorene see exactly what I thought of her.

But a scene is a thing you do for yourself. It would have been me standing over my boy yelling, and the whole square would have remembered Bo as the kid whose mother lost it at the sack race.

A phone call would have been worse. Call who? The festival committee? Lorene is the festival committee.

There is no sheriff for a grandmother who decides a child is not hers. There is no form you file.

I thought about my own mother, who would have had six things to say and all of them sharp.

I am not my mother. I run quiet. But I am her daughter, and quiet is not the same thing as nothing.

So I did the only thing that would put nothing on Bo and everything where it belonged. I started to think, cold and clear, the whole mile and a half home.

By the time the mailbox came into sight I had most of it. We would have our own race. Behind our own barn.

Every kid on the road. No list, no clipboard, nobody short on sacks.

Dale was in the shop when we pulled in. He took one look at my face and one look at Bo’s and set down his wrench.