The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair Page B

blond, the same color mine had begun to turn in my late thirties. It was from her that I’d gotten my Scandinavian features. We had high cheekbones, fine noses. But her skin still shone like porcelain, while mine had begun to show sun damage.
    Her needlepoint pictures competed for wall space everywhere in the house. Here, above the picture rail, she’d hung the cute ones. Snoopy slept on his doghouse roof, big-eyed cows munched flowers, kittens played with balls of yarn. “Shall we set the table, Mom?”
    “Oh sure, I guess it’s time.”
    I rescued Jake and took him with me into the dining room. First we pulled the gold tablecloth from the blond, built-in hutch, then we draped it, making sure the edges were even. This was our job. We’ddone it dozens of times before. Getting out the good china plates with the autumn leaf pattern, we did the tally—Bruce and Kris; my niece, Abby; nephew, Josh; and his little family. Mom, Jake, me. There would be nine of us.
    No plate for Dad. I looked over at his college graduation picture on the buffet. His dark eyes, under heavy brows and set in a young, smooth face, stared fixedly into a future now spent. “Just look at that handsome rascal,” my mother liked to say, as she gazed at the picture. “Is there any wonder why I married him?”
    But without the cap and tassel, Dad wouldn’t have looked so rakish, even back then. Mat burns he’d suffered in a high school wrestling match had caused the hair on top of his head to fall out, and it never grew back. We’d razzed him about his baldness. He always played along. Like the gold teeth that accented his smile, a vein of humor glinted in him despite his serious approach to work and what one of my aunts called his hard-assed opinions.
    He could not abide what he considered sloth in others. I remembered him pacing the sidewalk outside our farmhouse when my brothers and the hired men tarried over dinner, the noon meal. With his thudding gait and hulking shoulders, his bulb-toed work boots, and the crooked brimmed work hat he jammed low over his ears, he was a caricature of frustrated ambition. “Go in there and tell them to get their lazy butts in gear,” he would command me. In I would go, repeating his orders, eliciting laughter and a shuffle of boots and chairs. Empowered by my father, I’d felt like a toy poodle herding bulls.
    No plate for my brother Clark either. If he’d lived, would we be setting a place for Noelle, the woman who drove to meet him after his 1988 bicycle trip down the California coast? When he didn’t show up, she made the calls to all the local hospitals, then performed the dreaded task, identifying his body in the morgue.
    Clark, the eldest. He had been my protector when we were kids. According to family legend, he had even saved me from getting killed when we were traveling in Arizona and I’d toddled onto the highway in front of an oncoming truck. Then all those years later he slipped ona gravel shoulder and was himself hit, by a lumber truck. In the stoic way of farm families, we had absorbed the shock of his death into our interiors and moved on. But the loss was an untended wound.
    Jake opened the velvet-lined, wooden box of silver. Watching him work his way around the table, I recalled the Thanksgiving when Clark had apologized to me for not helping in the kitchen. “I want to,” he said, “but if I did, Dad would think I was a homo.” Screw that! had been my attitude. Ever since Jake was little, I had made it a point to insist on his helping with every meal at Grandma’s house.
    “Don’t be late.” I heard Kris command. She was speaking to Josh on the kitchen phone. “Julie’s new boyfriend’s coming to dinner.”
    Jake looked at me and pressed his lips together in a flat smile.
    Clark and Noelle hadn’t married, although Noelle told us that they’d been on a marriage track. “Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?” Mom had said many times. Was my family feeling hopeful on my