The Seat She Took From My Grandmother

Grandma folded her hands again and looked at the safety card.

I should explain how we came to be on that airplane, because it was my doing, and for about four minutes that Thursday morning I believed it was the worst idea I ever had.

My brother Jeff and his wife Amy live in Waxahachie, south of Dallas. In August they had a baby girl, seven pounds one ounce, and they named her Rosalie June. The Rosalie was for Grandma. Nobody told her ahead of time. Jeff called the farm from the hospital parking lot and I held the phone up to her ear, and I watched my grandmother, who did not cry at my grandfather’s funeral, sit down on the kitchen step stool and put her apron over her face.

She was eighty-six. The baby was six weeks old. It is a ten-hour drive from our place to Waxahachie, and Grandma’s hip will not do ten hours in a car, not anymore.

“Then I’ll see her at Christmas,” Grandma said. “If they come.”

“Or we fly,” I said.

“Oh, Megan. No.”

“It’s two hours, Grandma. Omaha to Dallas. Two hours and you’re holding her.”

She had not been on an airplane in eleven years, not since the spring before Grandpa Don died. After that she kept her garden and her Sunday school class and her Thursday cards. She only quit leaving Burt County.

I knew, the way you know things about your grandparents, that she had been a stewardess when she was young. There was one photograph of her in a little hat on the upstairs landing. I knew it the way I knew Grandpa had been in the Army. It was a fact about a person who existed before I did, and I never asked a second question about it.

I mention that because of what I did next. I spent three weeks preparing my grandmother for air travel.

I printed a map of the Omaha airport and went over it with a highlighter. I told her the seats were smaller than she would remember and that they did not feed you anymore. I told her not to be nervous about the noise the wheels make when they come up.

She listened to all of it. She nodded. She said, “Is that right,” several times.

The night before we left, I found her suitcase packed so neatly it looked like a display, everything rolled, nothing folded, her shoes in shower caps.

“Where’d you learn to pack like that?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said. “Around.”

At the airport that morning I held her elbow through security and she let me. When they called for the people who need extra time she was in the ladies’ room, so we boarded with our group and walked down the jet bridge with a line stacking up behind us.

I was ashamed of how slow we were. That is the truth. I was ashamed, and I was already apologizing over my shoulder to strangers, before the woman in the pink tracksuit ever opened her mouth.

So when she said it, people her age shouldn’t be flying anyway, some small ugly part of me thought: I did this. I dragged an old woman out of her kitchen and onto an airplane and now a stranger is saying to her face what everybody behind us was thinking.

The call light glowed. The man behind me said, “Miss, I’m sorry, could you,” and I had to go.

“I’m three rows back,” I told Grandma. “I’m right there.”

“I know where seventeen is, sweetheart,” she said.