The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

Booking it

I did it that night at my kitchen table on my laptop, with a cup of coffee going cold and Grandma’s county on my mind.

The plane was the thing I worried over most. A woman of seventy-eight who had never flown, I was not going to put her on two connections through Denver by herself. So I called the airline on the real telephone, the way Grandma would trust, and I booked her one stop, the short way, out of our regional airport an hour north, and I paid the extra for the wheelchair meet at every gate even though her knees are fine, because I wanted somebody with a badge watching her from the curb to the seat.

I called Aunt Faye in Mesa. I had not talked to her since Daddy’s funeral. When I told her what I was thinking, that old woman was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped, and then she said in a wet voice, “You’re going to bring me my sister?”

“If she’ll go,” I said.

“She’ll go,” Faye said. “You put her on that plane and I will be standing right there when the doors open. Don’t you worry about a thing out here. I’ve got a room all made up. I’ve had it made up for twenty years.”

I did not book a retreat. I did not book sound baths. I booked a plane ticket, nine nights at nothing because she was staying with her sister, and a little bit of spending money for the two of them to go see the Grand Canyon with a tour company that picks old folks up at the door.

It came to a hair under three thousand dollars. The same money, give or take, that Mama had asked me for.

The next part I was more nervous about than any of it. I had to tell Grandma June. Because Grandma June does not take things. She is the kind who tries to pay you back for the gas when you drive her to the doctor.

Telling her

I went out on a Tuesday, in the evening, which was not our usual.

She knew something was up before I got my coat off. “What is it,” she said. “Is it Jesse. Is it your mother.”

“No, Grandma. Sit down a minute.”

I had printed it all out, the way our family understands things, on paper. The flight. The dates. Aunt Faye’s address. The canyon tour with the picture of the bus on it.

I slid it across the table to her the same way I had slid the bank printout across to Mama three weeks before, and I thought about that, how the same move can be two completely different things.

She read it slow. She reads everything slow, with her glasses down her nose. I watched her get to the part with her own name on the ticket, June Hollis, and the word Phoenix, and I watched her hand come up to her mouth.

“Casey,” she said. “What did you do.”

“I sent you to see Faye,” I said.

“This is too much.” Her voice had gone thin. “This is way too much. Honey, no. You take this back.”

“I can’t take it back. It’s bought.”

“Then I’ll pay you. I’ve got my egg money, I’ve got some put by, I’ll pay you back every dollar if it takes me till spring.”

“Grandma.” I took both her hands across the table, the way she took mine at the graveside. “You’ve never asked me for one thing in my life. Not one. Let me do one thing you didn’t ask for.”

She looked at me, and her eyes behind the glasses filled all the way up, and one went down the soft part of her cheek, and she did not wipe it.

“Faye,” she said, like she was testing whether it was real. “I’m going to see Faye.”

“You’re going to see Faye.”

“On an airplane.”

“On an airplane. By the window. I got you the window.”

She laughed, which turned into a sob, which turned back into a laugh, and she got up out of her chair and came around the table and held onto me standing up, this little bird of a woman who had held me at my father’s grave, and she shook, and I held on, and neither one of us said anything for a good while because there was not anything that needed saying.