The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

I reached over and squeezed her knee. I didn’t trust my voice. A fourteen-year-old girl had carried that around for nine days because she thought her grandmother ought to know her father wasn’t a bad man.

I have been given a lot of gifts in seventy years. That was one of the best.

Sandy and I were polite the first couple of days, the way two women are who share grandchildren and know each other mostly from across a gym at ball games.

On Wednesday, at the Grand Prismatic Spring, we ended up side by side at the rail. The colors don’t look real, orange and yellow and that blue in the middle so deep it makes you dizzy.

“Dale would have hated this,” Sandy said out of nowhere. “He’d have stood right here and said, well, it’s a hot puddle.” She smiled. “Forty-four years, and I got him as far as the Wisconsin Dells once, and he complained about the price of fudge the whole time.”

“Lowell’s the same,” I said. “Lowell would bring his own coffee to heaven.”

She laughed, a real laugh, the first one I’d heard out of her. Then she said, “I always wanted to see this. I’d look at it in the National Geographic at the dentist. I never pushed him, because I figured there was time.” She looked down at the colors. “There wasn’t.”

“Lowell said that to me on the phone Saturday,” I said. “He figured there was time.”

We stood there with that between us. I thought about how the only reason either of us was at that rail was that a daughter loved her mother enough to lie, and a son loved his wife enough to do something wrong, and an old man changed the oil.

On Friday morning, the day before we all went home, Sandy found me in the parking lot at Old Faithful. I’d come back to watch it go one more time and tell it hello for Lowell, the way I’d promised.

She stood by my Buick with her purse held in front of her in both hands, like a girl asking to go to a dance. “Joan,” she said. “I wonder if I could ride home with you.”

I wanted to be sure I’d heard her right.

“The van’s crowded, and the kids want their movies, and I’d just like to talk to somebody my own age for seven hundred miles,” she said. “If you’ll have me.”

“It’s seven hundred and sixty-two,” I said. “Lowell’s going to want to know.”

“Then I’ll count them for him,” Sandy said.

We left West Yellowstone Saturday at seven, an hour behind the van. Eric hugged me in the motel lot for a long time. He doesn’t hug long, as a rule. “Call me when you stop,” he said, then heard himself and laughed. “That’s Dad’s line.”

Ella hugged me, then hugged Sandy and whispered something to her. Sandy told me later what it was. Ella had said, “Take care of my grandma.” Sandy had said, “Which one?” And Ella had said, “Both of you. Take care of each other.”

Sandy and I talked from West Yellowstone to Cody and only stopped for a bison, a different one, or maybe the same one.

She told me Dale proposed in the cab of a combine. She told me the last thing he said to her, in the kitchen in June, was to ask whether there was any more rhubarb pie. “There was,” she said. “He didn’t get to it. I couldn’t throw it out for a week.”