The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

Lowell looked at the itinerary on the refrigerator a long time, the way he used to look at a washed-out culvert before he decided what was wrong with it.

“Joanie,” he said. “You still want to see that geyser?”

I hadn’t mentioned the magazine picture in years. I didn’t know he remembered it.

“Since I was nine,” I said.

“Then go see it. You’ve got a car. You’ve got a license. You’ve got a husband who’ll change your oil.” He tapped the table. “You don’t need a van to see Old Faithful. They let anybody look at it.”

“It’s seven hundred miles, Lowell.”

“A little over, the way you’ll go. Two days if you’re smart, and you are. Gillette the first night. Over the Bighorns the second day and in the east gate. You don’t drive mountains in the dark, I don’t care what anybody says.”

“What do I tell Eric?”

Lowell shrugged. “Do you have to tell him anything?”

I thought about calling my son back to say I was coming anyway. I knew how that would go.

Somebody would offer the couch, and Sandy would hear about it and stay home alone after all, feeling like she’d pushed an old lady off a trip.

No. I didn’t want anybody fixing anything. I wanted to see a geyser on my birthday.

“I’m not going to make a point,” I told Lowell. “I’m not going so they see me.”

“I know you’re not.”

But I’ll be more honest with you than I was with Lowell. I looked at that itinerary on the refrigerator, Saturday, 9 a.m., Old Faithful, and a small part of me wanted my son to come around that boardwalk and see his mother sitting there. I’m a Christian woman, but I’m not a saint.

The next morning, before I’d finished my coffee, Lowell had the Buick up on the ramps in the garage.

It’s a 2009 LaCrosse, dark red, with a hundred and forty-eight thousand miles on it and a grocery cart dent in the back bumper. It has never once left me sitting.

Lowell changed the oil and filter and put in a new air filter. He checked all four tires with his gauge, then checked them again, and aired up the spare.

Then he laid a jug of water, an army blanket, a flashlight and a can of fix-a-flat in the trunk in a row. “You won’t need any of it,” he said. “That’s why you bring it.”

He wrote the route on the back of an envelope in his square printing, and under it: Call me every time you stop.

I booked a motel in Gillette for Thursday and one in West Yellowstone for the week, at a hundred and thirty-nine dollars a night. That hurt my bookkeeper’s heart.

On Wednesday Eric left a check for fourteen hundred dollars in my mailbox with a note that said, Love you Mom, sorry.

I put it in my Bible on the dresser. I didn’t cash it and I didn’t tear it up. I let it sit there between the Psalms.

That night my phone buzzed at bedtime. It was a text from Ella. Grandma why aren’t you coming? Dad just said it’s complicated.

Ella is fourteen and sharp as a tack, and she has been my girl since the day she was born. She learned rummy at my kitchen table, and she still cheats at it, and I still let her.