The Retreat I Gave Grandma June

The ring

Grandma June came home after nine nights, brown as a nut across the nose where the sun hat did not cover, with a bag of orange candy for me and a rock from the canyon floor for the windowsill and stories enough to last her the winter.

I picked her up at the same curb where I had dropped her. She came out through those glass doors under her own power with the lady in the vest behind her, and she saw me and her whole face opened up, and she came at me fast as her knees would let her and threw her arms around my neck.

“I flew,” she said into my shoulder. “I flew there and I flew back and I looked down at the whole country, Casey. I saw the clouds from the top.”

I got her and her suitcase to the truck. When we were both in and buckled, before I started it, she said, “Now hold on. Hold still a minute. I have a thing for you.”

“Grandma, the candy’s plenty.”

“The candy is not it,” she said. “Hold out your hand.”

I held out my hand.

She dug down in her purse, that same old purse, and she came out with a little twist of paper, and she unwound it, and inside was a ring. Silver, heavy, old-looking, with a stone in the middle the blue of a July sky with brown veins running through it like a dry creek bed.

Turquoise. Real turquoise, the kind they make out there, bought off a Navajo woman at a stand on the way to the canyon, Grandma said, haggled for, Faye standing right there helping.

“Faye and I picked it,” she said. “She said it was the right one. Give me your right hand, not that one, you’ll want to keep that one free for work.”

She took my hand in both of hers, the way you would steady something you did not want to drop, and she worked that ring onto my finger. It fit like it had been sized for me.

“There,” she said, and she held my hand up in the light coming through the windshield and looked at it. “There. Now every time you look down you’ll know your old grandma got to see the top of the world one time before she went, and it was you that did it.”

I could not drive for a minute. I just sat there in the airport lot with my grandmother holding my hand up to the sun.