The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

Dale

Uncle Dale called me the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I had never had his number in my phone. He cleared his throat twice before he said anything at all.

“Sheila, this is Dale Ruud. I wanted to tell you something myself, so you didn’t hear it secondhand.”

He paused. “I should have seen it. He’s my brother’s boy. I should have seen he was in trouble.”

“You weren’t looking for it,” I said. “I wasn’t either. I had the statements on my own hutch for eight months.”

“Well,” he said. He has a plowing business in the winter and cuts and sells firewood the rest of the year, and he’s been short a man since his own son moved to Minneapolis.

“I told Chad he works for me weekends now. Saturdays and Sundays. Plowing when it snows, splitting when it doesn’t.”

“Twenty an hour,” he said, “cash on Friday, and he tells Amber every dollar. That was my rule, not hers, and she liked it fine.”

He cleared his throat again. “I wanted you to know the boy’s going to be all right. We’re going to see to it.”

I thanked him. I meant it. After we hung up I sat at the kitchen table for a while thinking about Ken, who never would have known Dale Ruud from Adam, and how much he would have liked him.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was at Amber’s, like always. I brought the cranberry relish and two pumpkin pies, like always.

I almost didn’t go, and Amber called me Wednesday night and said, “Mom, you’re coming. The kids need to see everybody at one table.”

Chad answered the door. He took the pies out of my hands without a word and carried them to the kitchen, and then he came back and took my coat.

He hung it up. He said, “Happy Thanksgiving, Mom,” and he looked me in the eye when he said it.

He carved the turkey. He was quiet all through dinner. Amber was careful with him, but not cold, and I watched her reach over once and put her hand on his arm when Owen spilled the gravy, so he wouldn’t snap.

Lily had made me a turkey out of her hand traced on construction paper, with feathers colored in every crayon in the box.

She’d written “I love you Grandma” across the bottom in big letters that ran downhill off the edge.

Owen told me he was going to ride along with his dad and Uncle Dale in the plow truck sometime if it snowed on a Saturday.

“Dad says I can work the radio,” he said, like that was the best job in Wisconsin.

After pie, Chad walked me out to my car in the dark.

He stood by the driver’s door with his hands in his jacket pockets and said, “I got the first payment set up for Tuesday. I wanted you to know it’s real.”

“I know it’s real,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever said it right out there. I’m sorry. I’m going to be sorry for a long time.”

“Then be sorry and keep paying,” I said. “That’s all I need. You don’t have to say it again.” I patted his arm through that camouflage jacket and got in my car.