The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

What Mama saw at the salon

I did not call Mama and tell her what I had done with the money. That is not the kind of person I am trying to be, and the panel in my own conscience, my Grandma June sitting in my head, would not have stood for it. I did not do it at Mama. I did it for Grandma. There is a difference and I held onto it.

But a thing like that does not stay still in a town our size.

Grandma June, it turned out, had a phone that could take pictures, and Aunt Faye had a granddaughter out there who was all over the Facebook, and between the two of them, those old sisters got documented.

There was Grandma June and Aunt Faye on Faye’s back porch in Mesa with lemonade and both of them laughing with their heads back.

There was Grandma June in her sun hat standing at a rail with the whole Grand Canyon falling away behind her, one hand up holding the hat on, looking like she might lift off.

There was a close one of the two sisters’ faces pressed cheek to cheek, eighty-one and seventy-eight, and somebody had written under it, “Reunited after 20 yrs, thank you to whoever made this happen.”

That picture went around. Church people shared it. Cousins I had not talked to in years shared it.

Mama saw it at the hair salon.

I was not there, but I heard it from two different people, so I know it is close to true. She was in the chair at Deb’s getting her color done, and the girl washing out at the next sink had it up on her phone, that picture of the two old sisters at the canyon, and she turned it around and said, “Ain’t that the sweetest thing, this lady never flew before in her life and her granddaughter sent her out to see her sister.”

And Deb, who has known our family thirty years and does not miss much, looked over at Mama in the chair and said, “Why, that’s your Casey that did that. That’s your mother-in-law, June.”

And Mama, they tell me, did not say one word. She looked at that phone, at her own husband’s mother on the rim of the Grand Canyon in a straw hat, happier than any of us had seen her since the funeral, and she sat there with the color setting in her hair and she did not say anything at all.

I did not gloat about that. I want you to know. When I heard it I did not feel like I had won something. I felt a little sorry, if you want the truth, because my mother is not a wicked woman, she is a tired and frightened one who made a bad year worse, and I think she sat in that chair and saw, all at once, the whole shape of what she had asked me for and what I had done instead, and I think it landed on her harder than anything I could ever have said.

She never did bring up the retreat again. Not once.