The Grandmother Who Drove Bus 12

The carport was empty.

I stood at the end of my own driveway on North Jefferson with my suitcase in one hand and a grocery sack of my sister Marge’s tomatoes in the other, and I looked at the oil spot where my Buick had sat every night since Don and I drove it home.

I had been nine days in Ponca City, seeing Marge through a new knee. Lisa had driven me down herself so I would not have to take the highway alone. My niece Pam had brought me home and had already pulled away.

The kitchen light was on. My daughter’s car was parked at the curb.

Lisa was at my table with a cup of my coffee in front of her. She had let herself in with her key. She had the look she used to get as a girl when she had already decided how a conversation was going to go.

“Sit down, Mom,” she said.

I did not sit down. I set the tomatoes on the counter.

“Where is my car, Lisa?”

“I sold it. Tuesday. A man from Caldwell gave me four thousand dollars for it.”

“You sold my car.”

“My name is on the title, Mom. You put it there yourself.”

I had. That was the part I could not get around, not then and not for a long time after.

The spring after Don died I went down to the county treasurer’s office and had the Buick retitled. Joanne Keller or Lisa Rasmussen. I had just spent four months untangling a dead man’s paperwork, and I did not want my girl to go through that over a car. The clerk asked me, and or or. She explained it plainly. With and, it takes both signatures to sell. With or, either one of us could sign it away alone.

“Or,” I told her. “In case anything ever happens to me. I want it simple for her.”

It had been simple for her. The title was in my lockbox, and she knew where I kept the key.

“I put your name on there so you would not have trouble when I was gone,” I said. “Not so you could do it while I was at Marge’s.”

“I know what it was for.” She turned her cup a quarter turn on the placemat. “And then I got to thinking about Grandma.”

“You’re sixty-eight years old,” Lisa said. “A woman of sixty-eight has no business behind a wheel. I’m not going to sit around and wait for the phone call. I’m not.”

“I have not had so much as a parking ticket since 1987.”

“Neither had Grandma.”

She got up and went to my refrigerator, and that was when I saw the sheet of paper under the magnet. It was typed. Saturday, groceries, 9:00. Sunday, church, I will pick you up at 9:15. Tuesday, hair. Doctor, call me two days ahead.

“I’ll take you anywhere you need to go,” she said. “You just call. And the money is in the bank. It’s yours, it’s for you, for when you need things. I’m keeping it safe.”

“Keeping it safe from who?”

She did not answer that one.

I thought about who I could call. There was nobody. I had put her name on that title with my own hand. The woman at the county treasurer’s office would have told me what she told me three years before, that with or on a title either owner can sell. No law had been broken. My husband had been in the cemetery east of town three years that March. And Lisa’s husband, Jeff, worked second shift at the aircraft plant up in Wichita and slept days. I found out later he had been told I agreed to it.