The Long Drive to Velma’s Driveway

The woman at the counter, Kim, came around and helped me with the suitcase. She was about my mother’s age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain.

“She told me about you,” Kim said quietly while Grandma buttoned her gloves. “She said, ‘My granddaughter is coming from Iowa, and she will be here, because she always is.’ She said it like it was the weather.”

I didn’t trust my voice, so I just thanked her.

Grandma made Kim write her address on the back of a bus schedule so she could send a thank-you note within three days, the way she always has.

We found a motel by the airport with a room on the ground floor.

Grandma took off her coat and hung it over the chair just so, and took out her teeth and set them in a glass, and said her prayers on the edge of the bed with her hands folded. Then she was asleep before I had my shoes off.

I lay there in the dark listening to her breathe and the snowplows working out on the highway.

I texted Mike that we were safe. Then I opened Russ’s name in my phone and stared at it for a long time.

I didn’t call him. I had promised her.

In the morning, the roads south had opened. The bus company said her bus would leave at eleven.

Grandma looked at me over her coffee and her toast in the motel breakfast room, with her hair already set and her lipstick on.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose I ought to go catch that bus.”

“Grandma, you’re not getting on that bus.”

“Callie, you have a job, and a husband, and two children, and you have already driven half the night.”

“Mike says you’re not riding a bus to Arizona in January at 83. Those were his exact words. You want to argue with Mike, you call him yourself.”

She sat with that a while. Then she folded her napkin into a neat square and set it on her plate.

“I never have flown,” she said. “Your grandpa always said if the Lord wanted us up there, He’d have given us feathers. And my ears. I can’t do it with my ears.”

“I wasn’t going to put you on a plane. I’m driving you.”

“All the way to Velma’s?”

“All the way to Velma’s driveway.”

She looked out the window at the parking lot, where the snow was turning to slush under the morning sun. I saw her chin tremble, just once.

“I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like to see the country one more time with somebody I love.”

Before we left, she called Velma from the room phone. I heard only her side. “No, honey, I’m fine. No, he’s not with me. Callie’s with me. She drove down from Iowa in the night. We’ll be there Sunday, God willing.”

Then she was quiet a while, listening. “No,” she said finally. “Don’t call him. Let me do it. When I’m there, I’ll do it. Promise me, Velma.”

The first day we drove south on 35 into Oklahoma, then turned west at Oklahoma City onto Interstate 40.

The sky cleared to a hard, bright blue. The wheat fields along the road were brown and stubbled, with snow in the low places.

Grandma knew something about every town we passed, or she had a story that the town reminded her of. Her cousin who married a man from Clinton.