The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

The woman at the restroom door

I stopped again outside Des Moines a little before noon. Hazel woke up screaming the second the van stopped moving, the way babies do, as if she had been personally betrayed.

I fed her in the back seat with my knees up against the front seat, and she ate like she had never seen milk before. When she was done, she fell asleep with her mouth still open, and a little bubble of milk sat on her lip.

I needed a restroom badly by then. I tucked her into the car seat carrier, which weighed about as much as a bag of feed with her in it, and hauled it across the parking lot on my forearm.

At the restroom door, an older woman in a quilted barn coat was coming out. She looked at me and the carrier and the burp cloth still on my shoulder, and she put her whole back against that door and held it wide.

“How old?” she asked.

“Two weeks,” I said. “Fifteen days.”

She looked at me for a second longer than people usually do. “And you’re driving her by yourself?”

“To get my mother,” I said. “She hasn’t met her yet.”

The woman nodded slowly, like that made all the sense in the world. Then she touched my elbow, just once, very lightly.

“You’re doing fine, honey,” she said. “You’re doing just fine.”

I made it to the van before I started crying. Then I cried for the next forty miles, the ugly kind, with Hazel asleep behind me and the radio playing a farm report I did not hear a word of.

I don’t know that woman’s name. I never will. But I have thought about her more times than I can count.

Where are you

My phone buzzed at noon, on the seat beside me. Travis always called at lunch, from the break room, to ask how Hazel was eating. I had let it go to voicemail. Now it was a text.

“Where are you? Called twice. Everything ok?”

I pulled over at the next exit before I answered, because I was not going to be the woman who wrecked with a newborn in the back over a text.

I typed and erased four different answers. Then I sent the shortest one.

“Hazel is fine. Read the table.”

I turned the phone face down on the passenger seat and pulled back onto the interstate. It buzzed twice more. I let it.

I know some people would say that was cruel. Maybe it was a little. But he was at work until six, and I knew whatever I typed would not come out right. I wanted him to read the note in the kitchen, in our house, with the baby book open next to it.

Kansas City came up around three, and the traffic on the loop scared me worse than anything else on that drive. Then I was south of the city, on two lanes, and the hills started to roll up on either side.

The last hour was all curves and bare trees and creek bottoms. I had grown up on those roads. I had learned to drive on them in my dad’s pickup, with him gripping the dash and saying, “Easy, Jessie, easy.”