The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

Diane

Diane came over on Sunday afternoon. Travis had told her my mother was staying with us all week, and I knew it had to be hard for her to walk up our front steps.

She stood at the door with a pan of bars in her hands and her eyes already wet. My mother opened the door before I could get to it.

The two of them stood there looking at each other. Two grandmothers, sixty-two and sixty, one in house slippers and one in her church shoes, and between them nothing but a storm door and a whole lot of fear neither one had asked for.

“Barb,” Diane said. “I said something to my son I had no business saying. About you. I didn’t even know you. I’m sorry.”

My mother pushed the storm door open and took the pan of bars out of Diane’s hands.

“Diane,” she said, “I’ve only been here three days, and that baby has me so worn out I can barely see. I could use somebody who knows where Jessica keeps the coffee filters.”

Diane laughed, a short wet laugh. Then she came in.

The nursery rocker

That night, after supper, I went looking for the two of them, because the house had gotten very quiet.

I found them in the nursery. Travis had moved the old rocker in there before Hazel was born, the one his grandpa made, with the arms worn pale where three generations of hands had rested.

My mother was in the rocker with Hazel asleep against her chest. Diane was sitting on the footstool beside her, close, with one hand resting on the baby’s back.

They were talking low. My mother was telling Diane about the time I bit a boy in Sunday school. Diane was telling my mother about the time Travis climbed onto the roof of the garage in his Superman pajamas.

Neither one of them noticed me in the doorway.

After a while, my mother stood up very carefully, the way you do with a sleeping baby, and Diane stood up too. They traded places without waking her, Diane easing down into the rocker, my mother setting Hazel into her arms.

Then my mother sat down on the footstool and put her hand on Hazel’s back, right where Diane’s hand had been.

Travis came up behind me in the hall. He put his arms around my waist and set his chin on top of my head, and we stood there in the doorway together and didn’t say a word.

The next day, I printed the picture I took that night on my phone. I put it in the baby book, on the right side of the Grandparents page, in the empty paper corners.

It’s the two of them in the nursery rocker, taking turns.