The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

Why I did not just fix it

People have asked me since why I didn’t just buy another ticket. It is a fair question, and the answer is not complicated.

My maternity leave was unpaid after the first two weeks. The only card we had with room on it was the joint card, and the airline account was the one tied to Travis’s email. He had canceled it from his phone, and the credit sat in my mother’s name for a later trip.

If I had rebooked that ticket on our card, he would have seen it inside of an hour. And then it would have been a fight, the kind where you both say things, and I was too tired to finish a fight. I did not want to start one I could not finish.

My mother could not just drive up herself, either. She had cataract surgery the fall before, and she had told me plainly that she would not drive the interstate through Kansas City anymore. Her Buick had two hundred and ten thousand miles on it besides.

My dad would have driven her. He would have had the car packed the night before and a thermos of coffee in the cup holder. But Dad had been gone four years that February, and that was a hole in the plan nobody could fill.

So I sat on the edge of our bed that night with Hazel nursing and Travis snoring in the next room, and I opened the map on my phone.

Little Falls, Minnesota, to Clinton, Missouri. Six hundred and twenty miles. Nine hours and twenty minutes, it said, if you don’t stop.

With a two-week-old, you stop. I knew that much.

The note on the kitchen table

I didn’t tell Travis. I didn’t tell my mother either, which I know looks worse. I knew she would tell me not to come, and I knew I would listen to her.

Thursday morning, Travis left for the plant at five thirty, the way he always did. I heard the truck back out. I heard it turn onto the county road. Then I got up.

By six o’clock, I had the car seat base checked twice, the pump and its little cooler bag, two duffel bags, a box of diapers, a case of water and my good pillow in the van. The van was a red minivan we had bought used the summer before, when Hazel was still a plus sign on a test.

I wrote the note on the back of an envelope from the electric company and set it in the middle of the kitchen table, where he would see it the second he walked in.

I wrote it three times before I got it right, because the first two were mean, and I did not want to be mean. This is what I left.

“Travis. Hazel and I have gone to get my mother. Hazel is fine and I will stop every two hours like the nurse said. We will be home Sunday. There is chili in the freezer. I love you. Jess.”

Then I set one more thing beside it. It was Hazel’s baby book, the one Travis’s mother had given us at the shower, open to the page that said Grandparents.

On the left side was a photo of Diane, Travis’s mother, holding Hazel at the hospital the day after she was born. Diane lived twenty minutes away and had been over four times already.

On the right side, where my mother’s picture was supposed to go, there was nothing but the little paper corners, waiting.

I did not write anything on that page. I just left it open.