Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

But Dwayne did not know any of that. He had known Mom two seasons. He had known nurses his whole life, and his wife’s mother had gone downhill fast with her memory, so when a nurse looked him in the eye and said, “I see this every day,” he believed her.

And Kendra, who had sat on that camper step and eaten my mother’s biscuits, put her name on the host list the very same afternoon.

I drove Mom back to her house in town that same Saturday. She did not cry in the truck. She sat with her pocketbook in her lap and looked out at the wheat on both sides of the highway.

“Maybe I am,” she said, somewhere around the turnoff by the grain elevator.

“You are not,” I said.

“I did leave that key.”

“Because the latch was broken. Mom. Listen to me. What did I wear to Easter dinner?”

She looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Your green dress with the little white buttons, and you spilled tea on it, and you told Aunt Harriet you’d get it out with dish soap. You did not, by the way.”

I laughed, but it came out wrong, and I had to pull over on the shoulder for a minute. Mom reached over and patted my knee like I was the one who needed comforting.

I thought about going straight to the ranger station. I am not a shy woman.

I could have walked in there with a list of every name and date Mom had kept straight for 11 summers and laid it on his desk.

But I knew exactly what that would look like. One daughter says Mom is slipping, the other daughter says Mom is fine. Two grown women fighting in a county office about whether their mother’s mind is going.

Arguing with the ranger would have turned Mom’s memory into a public question, and that was exactly what Kendra wanted.

Every camper on that loop would hear about it by supper. Every one of them would start watching Mom for mistakes.

I was not going to let my mother be watched like that. Not at 74, not after 31 years of remembering every child’s name in the county.

So I went home and I opened my laptop at the kitchen table and I pulled up the county reservation page for the lake.

Loop B has 22 sites. The host site is number 3, right at the front where the loop bends past the bathhouse. And directly across the gravel from it, facing it like a mirror, is site 14.

Site 14 was open for the season. The county lets a few sites on Loop B go as seasonal rentals, June through August, at $460 a month with water and electric. That came to $1,380.

I sat there with my finger over the button for a long time. That was real money for us. My husband drives a feed truck, and our oldest still has two years left at the community college.

My husband came in from the garage and looked over my shoulder at the screen. He read it for a minute without saying anything. Then he put his hand on the back of my neck.

“Book it,” he said. “I’ll pull her trailer over myself.”

So I booked it. Before lunch on a Saturday, I paid $1,380 for a gravel pad across the loop from my sister, and I did not tell a soul except Mom.