The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern

The bench was the color of a church pew and about as kind to an old woman’s back.

I had been sitting on it since ten till nine that morning, with my one small suitcase on my knees and a folded piece of paper in my right hand. By four in the afternoon the paper had gone soft as a dishrag from my holding it.

My son had told me to keep it dry. I had kept it dry. That was how well I did what I was told.

Let me tell you how a woman of eighty-one ends up on a bench in the St. Louis airport, in the building my son called Terminal 2, with nobody coming for her.

My name is Oleta Teague. I live in Dunmore, Missouri, population nineteen hundred and some, in the white house on Pecan Street where my husband Elmer and I raised two children. Elmer drove a propane route for thirty-one years. I ran eggs. When he died, ten years ago this October, I had a house paid off, a Buick, and a widow’s check that did not stretch as far as the days did.

So I made a rule. Two hundred fifty dollars a month went into a savings book at First Farmers Bank, no matter what. Some months it came out of the check, some months out of eggs or a quilt. Never a month skipped. Not when the furnace quit. Not when my knee was done.

I called it my independence money. It was not for anything. That was the point. A woman who has to ask for every dollar gets told no with a smile.

A hundred and twenty months. Thirty thousand dollars and some change that I always rounded down, to be safe.

My son Randy knew about the book. I did not hide it. That was my first mistake, and I made it out of pride, the kind that wants somebody to see what you did.

Randy is fifty-five. He is assistant manager at Dunmore Farm Supply, the co-op out on Highway 9, and he is liked. When Elmer died, Randy came every Saturday for a year and mowed and fixed and carried. I want you to know that, because you are going to want to hate him, and I need you to hold two things in your head at once. He was a good son for a long time. Then he was a son who did this. Both are true.

He and his wife Kayla have two children. Hannah is fifteen and plays the clarinet badly and cheerfully. Cody is eleven and keeps rocks in a tackle box.

At Easter dinner this year, over the ham and the scalloped potatoes, Randy put down his fork and said, “Mom, I’ve been thinking.” His phone buzzed on the table twice, and he turned it face down without looking, the way a boy hides a bad report card.

When a man has been thinking at your table, count your spoons.

“Kayla and I will be married twenty-five years in October,” he said. “I promised her Hawaii when we were engaged. You’re not getting any younger, Mom, and neither are we. I want the kids to see the ocean with their grandmother. One time. The whole family.”

Kayla, to her credit, said quietly, “Randy, that’s too much to ask of her.”

“I’m not asking,” he said. “I’m offering. We’d handle everything. All you’d do is show up with a sun hat.”

I said an old woman does not go to Hawaii. I said all the things you say.