The Snow Blower My Son Sold

What my son told me on the phone

Chad is forty-one. He lives in Bismarck, eighty minutes down the highway, and runs a one-truck excavating outfit with two hired men and a skid steer he has been paying off since the spring before his father died.

He coaches his boys’ hockey. He is not a cruel person, and I want that written down first, because I do not want you to decide who he is from one bad week.

I called him from the shed.

“Mom, I’m on a lift station job, I’ve got about two minutes.”

“Hollis’s blower is gone, Chad.”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear a backhoe somewhere behind him backing up with its alarm going. Then he let out a breath, the way you do when you have been waiting three days for a tooth to be pulled.

“Yeah. I sold it Friday. Guy from Mandan came and got it. Nine hundred dollars, Mom, cash. It’s a machine. You can’t run a three hundred pound thing. Gordon will do your lane, or you can call Marv. I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“Mom. Come on.”

I did not raise my voice. I have never been a woman who could do it well, and I have come to believe that is a mercy, because what you say loud is what you carry.

I said, “All right,” and I hung up. I did not tell him about the card.

That night my daughter called. Tammy is thirty-eight, a nurse in Fargo, and she has never in her life been able to keep a thing from me for more than two days.

She started with “Mom, how are you doing?” in the careful voice of a person who has already read the chart. Then she said, “Did Chad tell you what he put in the family group text?”

I said no. She read it to me off a screenshot, her voice going flatter with every line.

My son had written to his sister and my sister Joyce and his wife and two cousins: Sold Dad’s blower, got 900, Mom can’t run it anyway and she’ll just move in with someone by Christmas. No sense letting it sit.

I thanked Tammy for telling me. She said I was not moving in with anybody, and I said I knew.

What I did not say was that my son had just told six people I was finished. Not unkindly. Just as a thing already so, the way you say a field will lie fallow.

It was not the nine hundred dollars. I have lived my whole life by the price of things, and nine hundred dollars was nine hundred dollars. It was the anyway.

Why I did not make a scene

I could have called the deputy. Deputy Ness went to school with Chad, and he would have sat at my table and said, kindly, that the machine had been in a shed on a farm still partly in Hollis’s name, that Chad was the oldest son, and that the county attorney was not going to lose sleep over it.

A thing you win in court, you lose at the supper table. I have watched that happen to two families in this county, and I have been at both funerals.

And there was something else, which I am not proud of, and it is the real reason. I wanted to know if he was right.

I had lain awake for eight months asking myself the same question in a different shape. Was I a woman who could stay out here alone?

Or was I what Chad had written, a widow who would go somewhere eventually, so that no one had to think about her lane?

I did not know. I figured the snow would tell me.