The First New Car of Her Life
Back at her house, she parked the new car in the driveway where the Buick had been and just sat in it with the engine off.
I let her sit. After a few minutes she got out and walked all the way around it once, slowly, touching it.
“Kaylee wanted to know if it would be a color,” I said.
Mom smiled. “You tell her it’s Grandpa’s color,” she said. “She’ll know.”
Shane called on Sunday night, the way he always did. I wasn’t there for that one. Mom told me about it Monday.
“He asked if I’d thought about it,” she said. “The scooter.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t have it, honey. I told him I spent it.” She was sitting at her kitchen table again, but there was no checkbook out this time, just a plate of the oatmeal cookies she makes when she’s restless.
“Did you tell him on what?”
“No.” She broke a cookie in half and didn’t eat either piece. “He got a little short with me. He said, spent it on what, Mom, groceries? And I said, something like that. And he said he’d call me later in the week, and he didn’t.”
I could hear it in her voice. Not anger. Hurt, a little, and worry under it. That is the thing about a mother.
She had just done the bravest thing I’d ever seen her do, and she was still lying awake wondering if her boy was eating.
“Are you going to tell him?” I asked.
She looked out the window at the deep blue car in the driveway, sitting there in the sun. “I’m going to show him,” she said. “I’m going to drive up there. I haven’t been to Chicago since your dad died. I’m going to drive up there in my car and take my boy to lunch.”
“It’s a hundred and fifty miles, Mom.”
“I know how far it is, Stacy. I drove your brother up there with a U-Haul trailer the summer he moved in. Your dad got a migraine at Joliet.” She set the cookie down. “Will you come with me? I don’t need you to drive. I’d just like the company.”
We went up two Saturdays later, on the twenty-fourth.
Tom had finished the beans by then and was switching over to corn, and Kaylee had a rabbit show, so it was just Mom and me, and a thermos of coffee, and a sack of cookies on the console.
Mom drove. She drove up I-55 through Bloomington and Pontiac and Dwight with both hands on the wheel, past all those miles of harvested fields with the dust hanging over the combines, and she did not let anybody rattle her, not even the trucks.
At Joliet the traffic thickened up the way it does, and her knuckles went white, and I said, “You want me to take it?” She said, “No, ma’am,” and set her jaw exactly the way Dad used to set his, and we kept going.
She had told Shane only that she was coming up and wanted to take him to lunch. I think he thought she was bringing a check.
I think, if I’m fair to him, he thought she’d changed her mind about the scooter, and he was relieved.
His street was all brick apartment buildings and parked cars bumper to bumper along both curbs.