The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

Then she went to bed in our spare room at seven-thirty, with the light still coming through the window, and she was asleep before I got the door closed.

Ferris got the first message, he told us later, at about four o’clock, when he walked out of the sale barn to his truck and finally had service. By then we had already come back across the field.

He did not bid on any calves. He started driving east.

It is three hundred miles from that sale barn to our place.

He drove it in a little over four and a half hours, which I do not want to think about too hard. He pulled into our yard at about a quarter to midnight.

Gage heard the truck and went to the door. I stayed in the kitchen, in my bathrobe, with my hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago.

I heard Gage say, “She’s asleep. She’s fine. She’s in the spare room.”

I heard Ferris say something I could not make out.

Then I heard Gage say, “Go on and look in on her. Quiet.”

Ferris came through the kitchen in his sale-barn clothes, smelling like cattle and diesel, and he did not look at me.

He went down the hall and opened the spare room door a crack and stood there.

He stood there for a long time. I could see him from the kitchen, his big shoulders filling the doorway, his hand on the frame.

I could hear Oleta breathing slow in there, and one of the cats purring.

Then he closed the door, very gently, and came back through the kitchen.

He stopped by the table. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something to me. Then he closed it. He nodded, once, to the floor.

“I’ll come for her in the morning,” he said to Gage.

“She’s welcome to stay,” Gage said. “Long as she likes.”

Ferris went out. I heard his truck start and idle in the yard for a long time before he drove away. I did not know what that meant. I still do not, exactly.

Oleta stayed with us four days. The water went down slowly. Her basement was ruined, and the bottom step of her porch had washed loose, but the main floor of the house never took water. Gage said a foot more and it would have.

He said thank you for the coffee. He did not say anything else.

That Sunday, Oleta asked if she could go to church with us instead of with Ferris. She wanted to ride in our truck.

She wore a navy dress I had taken to the cleaners for her and a little hat she had made Gage go back into her house to find.

She held my arm walking in from the parking lot. The same parking lot.

I could feel people looking at us, because everybody had heard about the boat by then. Merle had told it at the cafe, and the cafe tells everybody.

Ferris was already in his pew. He stood up when he saw his mother come in on my arm, and he stepped out into the aisle to let her in.

Oleta did not go in. She stood in the aisle with my arm in hers and looked up at her son, and the whole back half of the church got very quiet.

“I’m going to sit with Tamsin and Gage this morning,” she said. Not loud. Just clear. “They came and got me. I’d like to sit with them.”