The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

The floral bag

When we finished the pie, Travis stood up first. He went out to the van and came back carrying my mother’s floral bag. The zipper stuck, so he just carried it by the handles.

He carried it all the way across that parking lot, past the diesel lanes, to his truck. He set it in the back seat of the cab and buckled the seat belt around it, which made my mother laugh so hard she had to put her hand on the tailgate.

“I’ll ride with my son-in-law,” she told me. “You and that baby follow us. And you let somebody else lead for once.”

So that’s how we went home. Travis’s truck in front with my mother in the passenger seat, and the red minivan behind, with me and Hazel, the whole four hours north.

At every stop, my mother got out and came back to check on the baby. At every stop, Travis got out too and stood by the sliding door, and I let him do the car seat straps. He checked them twice, the way I do.

Later my mother told me what they talked about for those four hours. Mostly about Dad. About deer camp, which Dad loved. About the turkey Dad shot in 1998 that weighed twenty-three pounds and that he told the story of until the day he died.

“He asked me what your daddy would have done,” my mother told me. “I said your daddy would have bought the shotgun too, and then he’d have taken it back.”

What came back to the farm store

Travis took the shotgun back to the farm store the following Monday. They gave him most of it back as store credit, and he left the receipt for the return on the counter by the bread box, folded once, right where the first one had been.

He kept the decoys. I told him to. A man ought to have one thing that is his, and I meant it.

He did one more thing that week that I did not ask for. He used the airline credit in my mother’s name, and the rest of the store credit money, and he booked her a ticket for July. Kansas City to Minneapolis and back, for two weeks this time, not one.

He showed me the confirmation on his phone at the kitchen table. Then he put the phone face down, the way I had in the van, and looked at me.

“I came home to an empty house that night,” he said. “I sat right here. I looked at that empty page in the baby book for about four hours. I don’t ever want to come home to that again.”

“You won’t,” I said. “As long as there’s room in it for everybody.”