The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

When the last calf went up the chute and into the rear compartment, I climbed out to close the rear gate. Before I could reach it, Curtis took hold of it.

He slid the trailer gate shut himself and dropped the pin and checked it.

Then he slapped the side of the trailer once with his open hand, the way haulers do when a load is ready.

Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, and he took out a twenty-dollar bill and held it out to me.

I looked at it. I thought about that twenty on the tablecloth beside the cranberry sauce a year before, and every one of those 22 people who had sat there and not said a word.

“Keep it,” I said. “Put it in the plate tomorrow.”

He looked at me a long moment. Then he folded the bill and put it in his shirt pocket instead of his wallet. “I will,” he said.

Then he said it. The thing I had been waiting a year to hear and had stopped expecting.

“I was wrong at that table,” Curtis said. “I was wrong in front of everybody, and I’m saying so in front of everybody. I’m sorry, Roz.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked him. I had to know.

He looked at the ground. “Bertram’s been getting my loads,” he said. “Two of my regulars went to him this summer. I figured he’d put you in my mother’s lane sooner or later. And I thought if you couldn’t do it either, then it wasn’t just me.”

He shrugged, the way men shrug when they are ashamed. “Mom was sitting right there. I wanted to look big in front of her. I made you look small to do it. That’s the truth.”

That was his reason. I understood it. I had felt scared and small myself, crying in a cab on a frozen driving range.

But understanding why he did it did not make it right, and he knew that, and he did not ask me to say it did.

“Thank you for saying it,” I said. And I meant it.

Then Hazel came down off the porch.

She came slow, holding Emmett’s arm, in her chore coat and her good wool scarf, the one she wears to church.

She walked right past Curtis, patted him once on the arm, and came to me.

“I’m riding to the sale barn with you,” she said.

“Grandma, it’s forty miles,” I said. “That cab’s high, and the seat’s hard, and it’ll take an hour.”

“I rode to the sale barn with my husband’s daddy in 1959 in a bobtail truck with no heater,” she said. “I can ride in that.”

So Emmett and Curtis both helped her up. Emmett climbed up first and took her hands, and Curtis boosted her from below, gentle as you would lift a sleeping child, and she settled into the passenger seat like it was her own front porch.

I climbed up behind the wheel. Hazel set her purse on her lap, folded her hands on top of it, and looked out the windshield up the lane, the whole quarter mile to the county road.

“Go on, then,” she said.