The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

Curtis waited until the pie was on the table. That was how I knew he had been saving it, because Curtis never says the big thing over the turkey when people are still busy chewing.

“So Roz is going to drive truck,” he said, loud enough for the kitchen and the living room both. “Somebody tell her what a road test is.”

There were 22 of us at Grandma Hazel’s that Thanksgiving. Two tables pushed together in the dining room, a card table in the front room for the young ones, and a few of the men eating standing up by the stove.

A couple of the cousins laughed, the way people laugh when they are not sure yet if it is a joke.

I kept cutting the pumpkin pie into eighths, the way I have cut ten thousand pans of cake for school lunch.

“I know what a road test is,” I said. “I start school in January.”

Curtis leaned back in his chair. He is 49, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of sunburn on the back of his neck that never quite goes away, even in winter.

“You know what a pre-trip is? You know what an alley dock is? You ever backed anything longer than that minivan?” He grinned around the table. “She’s going to cry the first time she has to back a fifty-three-footer.”

Then he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and laid a twenty on the tablecloth, right beside the cranberry sauce.

“Twenty dollars says she quits before the road test. Anybody want the other side of that?”

Nobody did. That was the part that stung. Not one of them put a bill down for me, and I understood why. You do not bet against Curtis at his own mother’s table.

My husband, Emmett, set his fork down hard and pushed his chair back.

Emmett is two years younger than his brother, quieter, and he has worked the scale at the grain elevator in town for twenty years.

I put my hand on his knee under the table. He looked at me.

I gave a very small shake of my head, and he sat back down, but his jaw stayed tight the rest of the meal.

I did not say a word to Curtis. I passed the green beans to Aunt Vida, who had not asked for them, and she took them anyway and squeezed my fingers when she did.

Later, in the truck going home, Emmett asked me why I stopped him.

“Because there’s nothing to fight about yet,” I said. “If I tell him off, I’m the woman who got mad at Thanksgiving. If I pass, I’m the woman who passed.”

“There was nothing wrong with getting mad,” he said.

“There’s nothing to report and nobody to call,” I told him. “There’s just something to prove. And I want to prove it where the family stood.”

He drove a while without answering. Then he reached over and turned the heater up on my side, which is how Emmett says he agrees with you.

I should tell you how I got to that table in the first place, because a school cook does not wake up one day and decide to drive cattle.