The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

The one who never asked

I did not decide it at the clinic. I decided it that Sunday, at Grandma June’s.

Grandma June is my daddy’s mother. She is seventy-eight and she lives alone now in the little white house at the edge of town, the one with the glider on the porch and the lilac bush that was already old when Daddy was a boy.

When Daddy died, she lost her only son, and she did it quiet, the way she does everything. She did not fall apart at the funeral. She stood at the graveside in her good navy dress and she held my hand so hard my rings bit into my fingers, and she did not make a sound.

I go out there Sundays. I take her to church and then I take her to the Hy-Vee and then we sit in her kitchen and she feeds me more than any one person can eat.

That Sunday she had made chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes, which is the thing she makes when the weather turns, and we were sitting there and she asked me, the way she always does, “How’s your mother?”

And I did not mean to tell her. But Grandma June has a way of waiting that gets things out of you.

I told her about the account. Not to stir her up against Mama. I told her the Jesse part and I told her I had let it go, and she nodded and said, “Well. A mother will do an awful thing for a boy in a hole. I’d have done it for your daddy.”

Then I told her about the retreat. The three thousand. The sound baths. The desert.

Grandma June did not say anything mean. She is not built for it. She just looked out her kitchen window at the lilac bush for a minute, and then she said the thing that changed everything.

“Imagine that,” she said. “Arizona.” She said it the way you would say Paris, or heaven. “You know I’ve never once been on an airplane.”

I set down my fork.

“Seventy-eight years old,” she said, half to herself, “and I’ve never been up in the air. Your grandpa always said if the Lord wanted us up there He’d have feathered us. We never went anywhere. The farm doesn’t let you.” She smiled at me. “My sister Faye’s been after me for twenty years to come out and see her. She’s out in Mesa, you know, since her Harold retired. Twenty years I’ve been telling her next year, next year.”

“Faye’s still out there?” I said.

“Eighty-one and ornery as a cat,” Grandma said, pleased. “We write. She calls on Sundays after I’m home from church. I’d give about anything to sit on a porch with my sister one more time before one of us is gone.” She caught herself, and patted my hand, embarrassed to have said so much. “Listen to me. Eat your noodles.”

I looked at my grandmother, who had buried a husband and a son and never once asked me or anybody for a single thing, telling me she would give about anything, and meaning it small, meaning a week, meaning her sister’s porch.

And I thought about my mother, who had asked me for three thousand dollars so she could lie on a mat in the red rocks and get herself right.

I knew what I was going to do before I finished my chicken and noodles.