The Long Drive to Velma’s Driveway

Grandma called me at 3:40 on a Thursday afternoon in January, and the first thing she said was that she was sorry to bother me at work.

I was standing at the sterilizer in the back of the dental office in Decorah, wiping down instrument trays between patients.

I had my phone in my scrub pocket because Grandma was supposed to be on a bus, and I had told her to call me from every stop.

“Callie, honey, the bus isn’t coming,” she said. Her voice was steady, the way it always is, but there was something careful in it, like a woman stepping onto ice.

“What do you mean it isn’t coming? Where are you, Grandma?”

“I’m at the bus station in Wichita. They closed the interstate south of here for the snow, and the man says the bus won’t go until tomorrow morning. Maybe ten o’clock. Maybe later.”

I set the tray down. Dr. Halvorsen was laughing with a patient in the next room, and the radio was playing something soft, and all of it suddenly sounded very far away.

“Where’s Uncle Russ?”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear the station around her. A door opening and closing. Somebody’s child asking for a pop. The hum of a vending machine.

“He had a sales call at four,” she said. “He couldn’t stay. He bought my ticket, and he made sure I had my suitcase, and he gave me some money for supper.”

“How much money?”

“Forty dollars, honey. Two twenties.”

I want to be honest about what went through me then, because I am not proud of all of it.

I felt something hot climb up the back of my neck, and for a second I wanted to drive straight to Garden City instead of Wichita.

My grandmother, Imogene Ostrander, was 83 years old that winter. She had buried my grandpa eleven years before and my dad, her older boy, five years after that.

She had lived in the same small house in Hays for fifty-one years.

That fall she had finally decided to sell.

Her sister Velma, who was 80 and widowed too, lived in Mesa, Arizona, in a little stucco house with a lemon tree, and the two of them had been talking on the phone every Sunday night for years about living close again.

The house in Hays closed two weeks after Christmas. Grandma did everything right.

She gave away what she couldn’t carry, she sold the rest at a church rummage sale, and she put her furniture money and her savings together, a little over $30,000 in all.

That was where my Uncle Russ came in. Russ is Grandma’s younger son, 58, and he sells irrigation equipment out of a small business he built in Garden City.

Center pivots, pumps, parts. He has been at it twenty years and he works hard.

Russ told her it would be a headache to move money from her little Hays bank to Arizona.

He said he would hold it for her, safe, and send it to her new account as soon as she had one opened in Mesa. She wrote the check out to him at the bank herself.

Then Russ drove her the three and a half hours from his place in Garden City, where she had stayed since the closing, to Wichita, where the bus to Phoenix had fewer transfers, he said.

He bought her a one-way ticket on his phone. He set her suitcase down beside the bench.