Gail Siefken found me in the hallway outside the second grade room on a Friday morning in late October, and I knew from her face that something was wrong before she opened her mouth.
She had her keys in one hand and a folded bank statement in the other.
She was in the same gray sweatshirt she wore every time she drove Addie to Lincoln, and her eyes looked like she had not slept.
“Lise, I hate to even ask you this,” she said, keeping her voice low because a line of seven-year-olds was going past us to the library. “Did the raffle money ever get deposited? The account hasn’t moved.”
I told her it had to be a mistake at the bank. I told her my sister-in-law was taking it in Monday morning, and I had watched Tawny carry the coffee can out to her car after Sunday dinner myself.
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Gail nodded like she wanted to believe me. Then she said Addie’s next trip to Lincoln was Monday morning, and she had been counting on that money for the gas, and she was sorry to bring it up at work.
I put my hand on her arm and said I would find out by lunch. I meant it. I did not know yet that I already knew the answer.
My name is Lise Dunmore. I am thirty-nine years old and I work as an aide at the elementary school in Broken Bow, Nebraska, which is out in the middle of the state where the farm ground starts turning into the Sandhills.
My husband, Burl, drives a grain truck for a farmer north of town every fall.
During harvest he leaves before the sun is up and comes home when he can, smelling like corn dust and diesel, too tired to eat sometimes.
We have one daughter, Clara. She was eleven that fall. She is the kind of girl who makes lists for her lists, keeps her softball bag packed by the door, and pulls her brown hair back in a ponytail so tight it looks like it hurts.
Her best friend since kindergarten is Addie Siefken. The two of them have been in and out of each other’s houses so long that I have a drawer in my kitchen with Addie’s hair ties in it, and Gail has one with Clara’s.
In June, Addie got tired. Then she got bruises that did not make sense.
By the Fourth of July the doctors had a name for it, and by August Gail was driving her to Lincoln for chemo, a little over three hours each way.
If you have never driven that road, it is Highway 2 down to Grand Island and then the interstate east.
It is pretty country, but it is a long way to go with a sick child in the back seat and a bucket on the floor.
Gail figured it at about fifty dollars in gas for every round trip in her old minivan, and some weeks they went twice. Her husband works for the county roads department. They have insurance. Insurance does not buy gasoline.
It was Clara’s idea. I want that on the record, because I would not have thought of it.
She came home from school one afternoon in late September and sat down at the kitchen table with a pencil and the back of an envelope.