The Drive to the Lincoln Memorial

Then I went to Darlene, who owns the salon. I had not taken a full week off in four years. I asked her for June 8 through the 13th, and I moved twenty-three appointments by hand, calling every client myself.

I told Avery on the Sunday after Easter. We were sitting on the porch steps with the dog between us, watching a tractor go up and down the field across the road with a cloud of dust behind it.

“The Lincoln Memorial,” I said. “Tuesday, June 9, eight o’clock in the morning. You and me. I’ll drive.”

She looked at me like I had told her I was going to grow wings. “Mom, that’s like a thousand miles.”

“Eleven hundred and thirty,” I said. “I did the math. I’ve been saving since March. We’ll stay out in Virginia and take the train in. We won’t be on the tour, and we won’t bother anybody. But you’ll stand on those steps the same morning they do.”

She did not say anything for a while. She just leaned over and put her head on my shoulder, the way she used to when she was little and too tired to walk, and the dog licked her elbow, and we sat there.

I told Kevin that night, in the kitchen, with Avery in her room.

“Avery and I are going to Washington the second week of June,” I said. “I’m driving her myself. We’ll be gone a week. You’re staying here with Duke.”

Duke is our dog. He is a nine-year-old yellow Lab mix with bad hips who has to be helped up the back steps, and who has to be let out at six every morning and six every night, no matter what.

Kevin opened his mouth and then closed it. “I could come,” he said finally. “I could drive part of it.”

“No,” I said. “Not this time. This one is hers.”

He nodded, slow. He did not argue. I think, looking back, he knew there was nothing he could say that would make it any better, so he did the only decent thing available to him, which was to keep quiet.

We left at four in the morning on Monday, June 8. The charter bus had left the school the morning before, and the class was already in Washington.

I had packed the car the night before so all we had to do was get in.

Kevin was up. I had not expected that. He was standing on the porch in his sweatpants and his co-op jacket with Duke leaning against his leg, and he did not say anything until we were both in the car.

“Drive safe,” he said through my open window. “Call me from Ohio. Please.”

“I’ll text you,” I said. That was the whole goodbye. I backed out of the driveway, and in the mirror I could see him standing there under the porch light with the dog until we turned onto the blacktop.

Interstate 80 east. Iowa in the dark, then the river at the Quad Cities in full morning sun, then Illinois, which is long and flat and looks like home if home went on forever.

Avery counted the state lines out loud every time we crossed one.

“Illinois,” she said, around eight thirty. “That’s two.”

Somewhere in Ohio, we stopped for gas and a bathroom, and Avery opened the glovebox looking for the napkins I keep in there.

She pulled out a pair of work gloves instead. Her detasseling gloves from last July, gray and stiff, with the fingertips worn almost through and a little bit of dried mud still in the creases.