The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

“No, she’s right,” Eric said. He sat down on the bench next to me, right where I’d left room. He put his elbows on his knees and looked at the geyser instead of at me, because I think he couldn’t look at me yet.

“She said it right after we crossed the river, Mom, and I told her to put her earbuds back in.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I knew it was wrong the night I called you. I knew it on the phone.”

“Then why’d you do it, honey?”

He was quiet. Behind us the benches were filling, and somebody said it should be any minute now, and a little boy asked his daddy if it was going to be loud.

“Because Megan was crying every night,” Eric said. “Her mom was calling at two in the morning. I couldn’t figure out how to tell my wife no, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell you yes. So I told you no, because you’re the one who always lets me.”

I looked at my son. Forty-four years old, a big man with gray coming in at his temples, sitting with his hands hanging between his knees like a boy outside the principal’s office.

“That’s the truest thing you’ve said to me in a while,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” His voice broke right in the middle of it. “I’m so sorry. I took your birthday.”

And right then, right on that word, the geyser went.

There was a low rumble first, and a splash out of the cone, and another, bigger. Then it went up and up, a white column of water and steam pouring into that blue sky, higher than the grain elevator back home.

The steam blew back over us in the cold air and came down warm on our faces like a fine rain.

I didn’t stand up. I couldn’t. I sat on that bench with my son on one side of me and my granddaughter’s hand in mine on the other, and I watched it go up, and I cried like I was nine years old.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” Eric said, very quietly. I reached over and took his hand too, so I was holding both of them, and the three of us watched it pour into the sky until it settled and sank and went back to breathing.

When it was over, everybody on the benches clapped. I didn’t know you clap for a geyser. I clapped too. Then I called Lowell back, with Eric sitting beside me, and put him on speaker.

“It went off,” I said. “Lowell, it went so high.”

“Did you tell it hello?”

“I forgot.”

“There’s another one in an hour and a half,” Lowell said. “Is that boy there?”

Eric leaned toward the phone. “I’m here, Dad.”

There was a long pause. I could hear the dog’s tags jingling in our kitchen, seven hundred and some miles away.

“Good,” Lowell said. “That’s all. Good. Take care of your mother.”

“I will, Dad.”

“I know you will,” Lowell said, and hung up, and Eric sat there looking at the phone in my lap with his eyes full.

All this time Sandy had been standing back on the boardwalk in that tan fleece. When I looked up, she did not look like a woman who’d gotten her way.

She looked like a woman who’d just found out she’d been sitting in somebody else’s pew all along without anyone telling her.