The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

The porch

I had not called my mother. I meant to call from Kansas City, and then I meant to call from Harrisonville, and then I was turning onto her road and it was too late to call.

Her little brick house sat back off the road on two acres, with the porch Dad built across the front. Her Buick was parked around back. The porch light was on, even though it was still light out, the way she always leaves it.

She was out the front door and on that porch before I had the van in park.

I think she heard the gravel. I think some part of her knew. She stood at the top of the steps in her house slippers with one hand flat against her chest, and she did not say a word.

I got out. I didn’t say anything either. I opened the sliding door and unbuckled Hazel, who was awake and blinking and making the little goat sounds she made right before she decided whether to cry.

I carried her up the steps. My mother did not ask me what I was doing there. She did not ask me where Travis was. She did not say one single word about him.

She just held out her arms.

I put Hazel in them.

My mother looked down at that baby like she was made of glass and gold. She pulled the blanket back an inch from Hazel’s face with one finger. Then she bent her head down and closed her eyes and breathed in.

“Oh, there you are,” she whispered. “There you are. I’ve been waiting on you.”

Hazel stopped fussing. She looked up at my mother with those dark, unfocused newborn eyes, and she yawned the biggest yawn of her whole short life.

My legs went out from under me. I didn’t fall. I just sat down hard on the top porch step, with my back against the post Dad set in concrete thirty years ago, and I cried until my nose ran.

My mother sat down beside me on the step, slow, the way her knees let her now. She held the baby in one arm and put the other around me.

“You drove all this way,” she said. It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t a scolding. It was something closer to wonder.

“He canceled your ticket, Mom.”

“I know, honey. I got the email.” She rocked a little, side to side. “I figured there was a reason. I figured we’d sort it out in the summer.”

“I didn’t want to wait till summer.”

“No,” she said, looking down at Hazel. “No, I can see why you didn’t.”

The call that night

We ate supper at her kitchen table, the same oilcloth-covered table I did my homework on. She made fried potatoes and ham because that was what she had, and it was the best thing I’d eaten in two weeks.

She held Hazel the entire time. She ate with one hand. When I offered to take the baby, she looked at me like I had offered to take her kidney.

Travis called at six forty. I knew he had just walked into the kitchen. I could almost see it: his lunch box on the counter, his boots still on, the envelope and the baby book on the table.

I took the call on the porch step in the cold.

“Jess.” His voice was strange. “Jess, you drove to Missouri?”

“We’re at Mom’s. Hazel’s fine. She did great.”

“By yourself? Two weeks out? Jess, what if something happened?”

“Something did happen,” I said. “You canceled my mother’s ticket and bought a shotgun.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear the refrigerator humming in our kitchen, six hundred miles away.

“I’m too tired to do this tonight,” I said. “I’m not angry, Travis. I’m just tired. We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll be home Sunday like the note said.”

“Okay,” he said. Then, so quiet I almost missed it: “The house is real empty, Jess.”

“I know,” I said. “It was supposed to have one more person in it.”