“Did you print this at the library, hon?”
The deputy held my mother’s license up to the sun between two fingers, the way you would hold a twenty-dollar bill you were sure was fake. Then he laughed. It was not a big laugh. It was a small one, through his nose, just for himself.
My mother stood at the back bumper of her Buick with her handbag on her arm and did not say a word.
I was sitting in the passenger seat with a nine-by-thirteen pan of lemon bars on my lap. I had been told twice to stay there.
It was the second Saturday in August in Kessler County, Minnesota. Ninety-one degrees at a quarter past one in the afternoon. We were on County Road 6, about halfway between the co-op grain elevator and Our Savior’s Lutheran, where the ice cream social started at two o’clock. Corn stood on both sides of the road, taller than a man, so the road felt like a long hallway with no doors. There was no shade for a mile in either direction.
