The Summer of the Old Mail Jeep

So he was six hours away on a rig, and he would be there until the middle of July.

Waiting for him to get home would have cost Silas six weeks of healing. I have known enough old men with bad knees who never got their legs back to know a boy’s leg does not wait on grown-ups to sort things out.

I could have called Garrett right then and made him take sides from a pad in the middle of nowhere. I could have stood in that kitchen and told Kayleen what I thought of swim lessons. Neither one of those would have gotten Silas to Ellendale on Wednesday.

So I walked into the living room instead and sat down on the arm of the couch.

“How’s the leg?” I asked him.

“Fine,” Silas said, which is what fourteen-year-old boys say about their legs, their grades, their hearts and their hair.

“You doing the leg lifts off the paper?”

He shrugged. “Some. It hurts, Grandma. I don’t know if I’m doing them right.”

That was all I needed to hear. I stood up and went back into the kitchen, where Kayleen was holding a little brush up to the window light.

“I’ll be here Wednesday at a quarter to eight,” I said. “I’ll call the clinic myself and put him back on the schedule. You don’t have to do a thing.”

Kayleen looked at me for a long second. Then she shrugged, the same shrug Silas had, though they were not blood and had only lived under one roof for two years.

“Suit yourself,” she said.

So I did.

I should tell you how Silas broke his leg, because he would want me to say he was safe.

It was the first Saturday in June, a Legion game in our little town just south of the state line, and Silas was on first base with two outs. He plays second base for the town team, and he is fast, and he is fourteen, and fast fourteen-year-olds do not believe in being thrown out.

He took off on the pitch. The catcher threw a good one. Silas slid in hard, and his spike caught the edge of the bag, and his body kept going after his foot stopped. I heard it from the bleachers. I will hear it the rest of my life.

The umpire called him safe. He tells everybody that part first.

The ambulance took him to Aberdeen. The surgeon put two thin bendy rods inside his shinbone, the kind they use on kids who are still growing, and sent us home after two days with a splint, a pair of crutches and a sheet of instructions.

The sheet said physical therapy three times a week, starting in ten days, for about twelve weeks. It said the clinic in Ellendale, because that was the closest place that took Garrett’s insurance and had a therapist who worked with young athletes.

Ellendale was twenty-two miles north of Garrett’s house, up across the North Dakota line. Forty-four miles round trip. I had driven that road a thousand times. I just hadn’t ever driven it for anything this important.

Now I need to tell you about the Jeep, because the Jeep was half of that summer.