“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.
He had pulled us over eleven minutes after we left her driveway.

You have to understand something about my mother. She drives forty-eight in a fifty-five. She has driven forty-eight in a fifty-five since I was a little boy. She uses her blinker to pull out of her own yard, when there is nobody on the road for three miles. The county had sealed that stretch of County Road 6 back in July and never came back to paint the center stripe, so I honestly do not know what line he thought she had crossed.
He never told us. Not once.
He had walked up to her window with his sunglasses on. Tan uniform, the creases still sharp from the package it came in. He looked about nineteen years old. I found out later he was twenty-four, and he had been wearing that badge for eleven days.

“License and insurance.”
No good afternoon. No ma’am. Nothing.
She handed him the insurance card. Then the yellow paper. Then her old plastic license, the one with the corner clipped off. She had turned seventy-one on the third of the month. She had renewed that same week at the license bureau down in the courthouse basement, and the new card had not come in the mail yet. That yellow paper is what they give you in the meantime. Every person in the state of Minnesota has carried one at some point.
He looked only at the yellow paper.

“What’s this supposed to be?”
“That’s my temporary license, Deputy. The card underneath is the one it replaces.”
“Looks homemade.”
“It does look that way, doesn’t it,” she said, as pleasant as a church greeter on Easter morning. “They have never once made a nice one.”
He did not like that she agreed with him. I watched it cross his face. You could almost see him looking for a place to put it.
“Step out of the vehicle, ma’am.”

“Of course.”
“Stand at the rear of your car where I can see you.”
I leaned across the seat. “Is that really necessary? She’s seventy-one. It’s ninety degrees out here.”
He bent down and looked at me through her open door. I could see myself, small and stupid, in both of his lenses.
“Sir, you are going to stay in that seat with your hands where I can see them, or you and I are going to have a very different kind of afternoon.”
“Sit still, Jeffrey,” my mother said……Continue Reading…