The Cowbell at the Two Mile Mark

One was saving up for her wedding. One had two little boys at home. One had just started in September.

“I’ll take Friday,” the new one said, before I had even finished asking.

“I’ll take Saturday,” said the one saving for her wedding.

“I’ll do Sunday,” said the other. “You’ve covered me four times since summer. Don’t you even say thank you, Jolene. Just go.”

I had to look at the floor for a second. That is what happens in a place like that. You think nobody is keeping track of what you do, and then it turns out everybody was.

I was walking back down the hall to finish my rounds when I passed Room 12. The door was open, the way she always kept it, and she called out to me before I got by.

The lady in Room 12 was ninety-one years old. She had raised four boys on a place south of Kimball, and she still sat up straight in her wheelchair like she was waiting for someone important to come up the lane.

“I heard all that,” she said. “These walls are paper. Come in here.”

I went in. She had the sun on her lap and her Bible open on the tray table to the Psalms, the big print one her church ladies had brought her at Christmas.

“Your girl made state,” she said.

“She did. She’s the only girl from our school who made it this year. Our girls didn’t place high enough at regions to go as a team, so she’ll be running for us alone.”

“And her daddy’s going fishing.”

“Bass tournament,” I said. “In Missouri.”

She made a small sound in her throat, the sound my own grandmother used to make at the price of things. Then she reached out and patted my wrist with a hand that felt like paper over twigs.

“I’ve got a cowbell,” she said. “A big one, brass, off my husband’s old milk cow. I rang it at every one of my boys’ ballgames for twenty years. Football, basketball, track. The referees hated me.”

I laughed. I could not help it.

“My son comes Thursday,” she said. “I’ll have him bring it from the house. You take it to Sioux Falls and you ring it for that girl. And you bring it back and tell me how she did.”

“I can’t take your cowbell.”

“You can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m ninety-one. Now go on, before I cry and make a fool of myself, and I’ll be praying for her at eleven o’clock Saturday morning, you tell her that.”

I finished my shift without crying, because you do not cry at work in a nursing home. But I cried a little in the car at three thirty, with the heater going and the sun on the dashboard and the Missouri River showing blue between the buildings at the bottom of the hill.

Then I wiped my face with a fast food napkin from the door pocket and drove the thirty-five miles home up the interstate to Presho to tell my daughter.

Ainsley was at the kitchen table when I came in, still in her practice clothes, eating peanut butter toast and doing algebra.

The table was the old oak one from my mother’s house, and the afternoon light was laying across it in a long stripe.

Her running shoes were by the back door, the ones she had bought with her own babysitting money in July.