The Bump
The wagon was already loaded when I came around the barn with the last of the bale twine in my hand. I saw my sister Megan standing in front of Miss Ada like a gate.
Ada is eighty-three. She had her good brown coat on, the one with the fur collar, and her cane hooked over her wrist the way she does when she means to climb.
She was reaching for the little iron step. Harlan welded that step onto the side of the wagon years ago. It is there for exactly her.
Megan had her arm out. She was not touching Ada, just filling the air in front of her so Ada could not pass.
“Miss Ada, hon, we are so tight today,” Megan said. “Would you mind catching the next one?”
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I stopped where I was. I had hauled hay on that same wagon with my dad when I was nine. I had never once heard anyone tell Ada to catch the next one.
“The next one is at two,” I said. It was ten in the morning.
Megan did not look at me. She kept her bright face pointed at Ada.
“The next one will be just as nice,” she said. “Carl’s folks drove all the way from Sioux Falls. I promised them the front.”
Ada had already stepped back. That is the thing I cannot get out of my head.
She did not argue. She put her cane down flat and took one step back off the iron step.
“Of course, of course,” she said. “You young folks go on.”
Her voice was trying so hard to be no trouble that it broke something loose in my chest.
Carl’s mother and father were up on the front bench already. That is the good bench, beside the driver, the only one with a back rail.
They looked comfortable up there. They had no idea what the seat was, or whose it had always been.