The Long Drive to Velma’s Driveway

“Grandma,” I said, “did Russ wait to see if the bus was running?”

“It was running when he left, honey. The board said on time. It changed about an hour after.” She cleared her throat. “He walked out to his truck with his keys already in his hand. I watched him go. He looked tired, Callie. He’s looked tired since Thanksgiving.”

I asked her if she had called him.

“I called once,” she said. “It went to the voicemail. He’s driving, and he’s got that meeting. I didn’t want to make him turn around in this.”

My first thought, the sensible one, was to call the Sedgwick County sheriff and ask somebody to go sit with her.

My second was to call Russ and tell him exactly what I thought of a man who leaves his mother on a bench with two twenties.

Grandma heard both of those thoughts before I said a word. She has always been able to do that.

“Callie Jo, don’t you call the sheriff on my son,” she said. “And don’t you call him either. I handed that money to him with my own hand. He’s my boy. Whatever this is, it’s between him and me, and I’ll be the one to settle it.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

There was a long breath on the other end, and then her voice went small in a way I had never heard before.

“I don’t know, honey. I just didn’t want to sit here and not have anybody know where I was.”

That was the sentence that did it. I looked at the clock over the sterilizer. It was 3:47.

Wichita was about nine hours from Decorah on a dry road, and the road was not going to be dry.

“Stay right there,” I said. “Don’t get on any bus. I’m coming to get you.”

“Callie, that’s nine hours.”

“Then I’d better leave now.”

I went to find Dr. Halvorsen. He is a quiet Norwegian man who has known my family since I was in braces, and he looked at my face and said, “Go on. We’ll call your four o’clocks.” He did not ask a single question, and I have loved him for that ever since.

I called my husband, Mike, from the parking lot.

He was at the shop, where he works on farm equipment for a dealer out on the highway, and I could hear an air wrench going behind him.

“Grandma’s stuck at the bus station in Wichita,” I said. “Russ dropped her off and left. The bus is cancelled until morning and she’s got forty dollars.”

The air wrench stopped. Mike is not a man who talks much, but he is a man who moves. “Come by the shop on your way,” he said. “Don’t go home first.”

When I pulled in, he already had my car up on the lift.

He checked all four tires, topped off my washer fluid with the winter kind, and put a shovel, two blankets and a bag of sand in the back. He filled a thermos from the coffee pot in the break room.

“I’ll get the kids from school,” he said. “Sam has practice till five, Ella’s at your mom’s. Call me from every gas station. If it gets bad past Kansas City, you stop. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

He held onto my door a second longer than he needed to. “Tell her I said she’s not riding any bus to Arizona,” he said. “Not in January. Not at 83.”

I left Decorah at 4:20. The snow started in Missouri.