The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

The sun hat and the curb

I drove her up to the airport myself, that next week, an hour north on the two-lane past the elevators and the bean fields down to stubble.

She had a brand new suitcase. She had bought it herself at the Walmart, small, on wheels, and she had packed it three days early and unpacked it and packed it again. She had a straw sun hat in her lap the whole hour, holding it with both hands, because Faye had told her the desert sun was a different animal and she was taking it seriously.

She was quiet most of the way. Then about halfway she said, “I keep thinking your daddy would get a kick out of this.”

“He would,” I said.

“My boy never flew either,” she said, looking out at the fields. “I keep thinking I’m doing it for the both of us.”

I had to drive with my jaw set for a minute after that.

The regional airport up there is not a big place. One little terminal, a few gates, you can park across from the doors and walk right up. I pulled to the curb and the morning was bright and cool and you could smell somebody’s field being worked somewhere off past the fence.

I got her suitcase out of the back and pulled the handle up for her. She stood there on the curb in her good slacks with the sun hat on her head now and her boarding pass in her hand, and ordinary folks moved around us with their roller bags and their coffees, and a man kissed a woman goodbye, and a cab let somebody out.

Grandma June looked up at that little terminal like it was the gate of a city she had only read about.

She was scared. I could see it in her hands. And she was so happy she could hardly stand it. Both at once, right there on her face, the fear and the joy fighting it out, and the joy winning.

“You stay with the lady in the vest,” I told her. “She’ll walk you the whole way. Faye’s on the other end. I already talked to her twice this morning.”

“Casey,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She reached up and put her small cool hand against my cheek, the way she must have done to my daddy when he was small, and she looked at me and did not say anything, because she is not a woman of many words and neither am I.

Then she squared her shoulders under that straw hat, and she took the handle of her suitcase, and she walked toward the glass doors of the terminal. The doors slid open for her. She looked back at me, just once.

And then she went in.