The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

The therapy schedule was stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a strawberry, and every single date on it had a line drawn through it.

I stood in my son’s kitchen on a Monday morning in June with a pan of rhubarb bars in my hands and read it twice. Three days a week. Twelve weeks. The clinic in Ellendale. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday crossed out, all the way into September.

My grandson, Silas, was on the couch in the next room with his left leg propped on two bed pillows. He had a gray splint on it and a bag of frozen peas on his knee, and he was watching a fishing show with the sound off.

He didn’t look up when I came in. That was how I knew he already knew.

“Kayleen,” I said, “what happened to his therapy?”

My son’s wife was at her nail table in the front room, the one she set up by the big window for the light. She had a customer coming at nine, and she was laying out her little bottles in a row like soldiers.

“I called and canceled,” she said. “They gave him the exercises on a sheet of paper. He can do them right there on the living room floor. That’s all they do in there anyway, Ione. Leg lifts.”

I set the rhubarb bars on the counter. I set them down slow, because I have learned in sixty-six years that the things you set down slow are the things you don’t end up throwing.

“The surgeon said three times a week,” I said. “He said the first weeks matter most.”

“The surgeon doesn’t buy my gas,” Kayleen said. She didn’t say it mean, exactly. She said it the way you’d tell somebody the price of eggs. “It’s forty-four miles round trip. Three times a week is a tank every week and a half. I don’t have it.”

I want to be fair to her, because I have prayed about being fair to her, and I have not always managed it.

Kayleen was thirty-four. She ran a nail business out of that front room, and it had been a slow year, and she had two girls of her own, nine and eleven. My son Garrett’s checks from the oil field barely covered all of them. That was her reason, and I believe she believed it.

But I had been in town Saturday morning, getting my hair done, and I had heard all about how Kayleen was driving her girls to Aberdeen for swim lessons every Tuesday and Thursday that month. Forty miles each way.

I didn’t say that. I didn’t need to say it. It sat in that kitchen with us anyway.

My son was not there to say anything either. That was the other part of it.

Garrett was forty and worked two weeks on and two weeks off in the oil field out west, about six hours from home. When Silas broke his leg, Garrett drove back through the night and was at the hospital in Aberdeen by the time they wheeled him out of surgery.

He stayed three days. Then he went back out, because he had signed on for three hitches in a row that summer, six straight weeks, to pay down the deductible. The surgery left the family owing a little over four thousand dollars, and Garrett was the kind of man who paid what he owed before he slept.