The Two Miles I Pushed My Son

The lift hung crooked off the side of the van like a broken wing, and Chad stood there jingling the keys in his hand like he had done me a favor.

“It was doing that the whole way back,” he said. “I figured it’d work itself out.”

I did not answer him right away. I was looking at the platform. It sat tilted, one corner dropped low, the metal arm that was supposed to hold it level bent back on itself. There was a long scrape down the aluminum and a dent the size of a dinner plate near the hinge.

I pressed the button on the hand control. The motor made a sound I had never heard it make, a grinding whine, and the platform shuddered an inch and quit.

“Don’t force it,” Chad said, like he was the one who knew.

It was Sunday, a little after six. The sky over the fields behind our place had gone that soft gray it goes before the color leaves it. Eli was inside at the kitchen table. I could see the back of his head through the screen door, bent over a library book about sharks.

“What did you do to it,” I said.

“Nothing. We loaded it up for the lake is all. Coolers, the grill, Dylan’s tent.” He shrugged. “Platform’s rated for a chair, not a party, I guess. It’ll be fine.”

“It is not fine, Chad. It will not go up.”

He looked at the lift the way you look at weather. Not his problem, just something happening.

“He’s ten and he’s in that chair,” he said. “Kid never goes anywhere anyway. He won’t miss it.”

The van

I need to tell you about the van, because a person who has never needed one does not know what it is.

It is a 2009 Ford full size, white, with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and a wheelchair lift bolted into the side door. Dave and I bought it two years ago from a man up in Bolivar whose wife had passed. We paid four thousand dollars we did not have, and we drove it home feeling like we had won something.

Before the van, getting Eli anywhere was a wrestling match. He has spina bifida. His legs do not carry him, and he is ten now, not four, and he is tall for ten. His chair is a manual chair, the kind you push, not one of the heavy power chairs, because we cannot afford one of those and because he likes to push himself when the ground is smooth.

But I still have to lift him, and lifting a ten year old out of a chair and up into a seat and then folding the chair and hauling it in, four and five times a day, in the rain, in the cold, in the church parking lot while people wait, that is a thing that wears a body out.

The lift changed our lives. You roll the chair on, you press the button, it carries him up level with the floor, he rolls in, you strap down. Ninety seconds. No lifting. He sits up front where he can see.

That lift was the difference between my son having a world and my son having a living room.

It had cost the man in Bolivar three thousand two hundred dollars to put in, new, before his wife got sick. I know because he kept the receipt in the glove box and gave it to me like it mattered, and it did.