The Thirteenth Ride to Omaha

The first slip came on a Tuesday in early December, in my own driveway, with the heater running in my son’s pickup and my body still humming from the first bag of chemo they had ever put into me.

Tanner reached across me, opened the glove box, and took out a little spiral notepad, the kind they sell two for a dollar at the Casey’s by the highway.

He tore the page off clean along the wire and held it out to me.

It said, in his square printing that had not changed since the fourth grade: Gas and time. $40.

“For the drive, Mom,” he said, looking out the windshield at my garage door instead of at me. “Gas is up. It’s a hundred and forty miles round trip.”

I sat there with that slip in my lap. My mouth tasted like a nickel, which the nurse had warned me about.

I am a retired bookkeeper. I kept the books at our farmers co-op for thirty-one years. I know what a bill looks like, and I know what it means when somebody hands you one.

“All right,” I said. That was all I said. I got out of the truck, slower than I wanted to, and I went inside and wrote him a check at my kitchen table.

He came in behind me, stood in the doorway with his boots on the rug so he would not track snow on my floor, and took the check when I held it out. He folded it once and put it in his wallet.

He did not look at it. He did not look at me either.

He said he would see me next Tuesday at six-thirty, and he went back out and backed down the drive, and I watched his taillights turn toward town.

Then I sat down at that kitchen table and cried for about ten minutes, which was the first time I had cried since the doctor said the word, back in November.

It was not the forty dollars. I want to be clear about that, because people who hear this story always think it was the money.

It was that he was my son. It was that I had driven him to every ball practice and every dentist appointment and every 4-H show for eighteen years, and never once had I thought to hand him a bill.