He was breathing short, too, stopping on the landing like an old man with a hand on the rail, and he’d told me twice that his legs felt funny, heavy and tingly, which is the thing they tell you to watch for. It can mean his potassium is climbing.
“Mom,” he said from the table. “It’s fine. I’ll go Monday. Grandpa’s probably right.”
“Grandpa is not a nurse,” I said, and I picked up the phone again.
The dialysis unit is in the hospital in Valley City, about fifty miles from us. His kidney doctor is in Fargo, but she set it up so he could run closer to home, under her orders, with a nurse named Lorna who has been doing this for twenty-six years and does not soften anything.
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I told her everything. The ankles, the stairs, his legs, the weight on the bathroom scale, which was up almost four kilos since Wednesday. She was quiet while I talked, and I could hear her writing.
“Kristin,” she said, “he cannot go to Monday. That’s a five-day gap with fluid already on him and his legs doing that. That’s how teenagers end up in intensive care in Fargo, or worse. I need him here today.”
“The lane’s drifted shut. Four miles of it.”
“Then get him to a road.” Her voice didn’t change at all. “If you can get him to a plowed highway, you call the ambulance and they will meet you there. Don’t drive him yourself if he’s breathing like that. I’ll hold his chair as long as I have to. I’ll stay late.”
I said I would. I didn’t know how yet.
Then I called Nils. My husband hauls cattle for some of the neighbors in the winter to make the land payment, and he had left Wednesday with a load of bred heifers for a sale barn in South Dakota.
The storm caught him coming home. He was sitting at a truck stop in Aberdeen with an empty trailer and every road between us closed.
“I already called Dad,” he said, before I’d finished. He sounded like he hadn’t slept. “Last night, and again at six this morning. He told me the same thing. Seventy-five dollars and it’ll fill back in. I told him Cody’s not a calf, Kris. He hung up on me too.”
“Your dad has that tractor sitting right there.”
“I know it.” I heard something hit the wall of the truck cab, his hand probably. “I can’t get there. They’ve got the gates down on 281 and on the interstate both. I’d be four hundred miles of ditch. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not yours to be sorry for,” I said. “Stay off the road. I’ll figure it out.”
I want to be honest about what went through my head after I hung up, because people have asked me since.
Why didn’t I call the county? The county does not plow private lanes, and our lane is private, four miles of it from our yard to the highway, and the first half of it runs straight through Orvin’s place.
The township grader doesn’t come down it. It never has.
Why didn’t I call the ambulance to come to the house? Because an ambulance can’t drive through a six-foot drift any better than my minivan can.
They’d have had to wait at the highway regardless. Why didn’t I go over there and fight with him? I thought about that one longest.
I could have driven the snowmobile over and stood in his kitchen and said every true thing I had been saving up for eighteen years of marriage.