“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.

“Would you get the powdered sugar down for me?”

I reached up to the shelf.

Outside, the road was empty. The corn was gone, the fields were brown, and the first snow was melting along the edges of the driveway.

My mother stood at the counter, humming a hymn under her breath, making something sweet for people she loved.

And I got the powdered sugar down for her.