We stayed the second night in Salina, Kansas.
I called Vern from the motel parking lot, standing by the ice machine, so Ardis wouldn’t hear me.
“Black pickup’s still in your driveway,” Vern said. “That’s the brother’s. Brett’s been around most days. His truck comes and goes. The girl leaves for the care center about six every morning, regular as a clock.”
“Thank you, Vern.”
“Gordon,” he said. And then he paused. “Go easy, if you can. That boy’s been carrying something heavy. You can see it in how he walks.”
I stood by that ice machine for a long time after we hung up.
Tuesday morning, we left Salina at five o’clock, in the dark.
North, up past Concordia, toward Nebraska. The fields were brown and wet and empty. Old cornstalks stuck up out of the mud like broken pencils.
Ardis had her hands folded in her lap.
Outside Concordia, she said, “He never asks us for a dime, you know. Not since he was eighteen.”
“No,” I said. “Maybe that’s the trouble.”
She turned and looked over at me then.
I think that was the first thing I’d said on that whole trip that she agreed with.
We crossed into Iowa at Council Bluffs a little before ten in the morning.
North of Ames, the snow started showing up in the ditches. Old and crusted. Gray along the shoulders where the plows had thrown it up all winter.
I knew every grain elevator on that road. Every single one. I could have told you which co-op owned it. What it held. Who managed it back in 1990, and who his wife was.
So I did. For about forty miles.
“That’s the Farmers Co-op in Story City. Merle Lindgren ran that one. His wife made the best rhubarb pie in Story County.”
“Is that right,” Ardis said.
“That one’s West Central. They put in the new leg in ’98.”
“Is that right.”
She let me go on like that for a long time. I think she knew I needed to.
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