A revival she went to in Elk City in 1961 where the preacher’s tent blew down. A pie she ate in Shamrock, Texas, that she was still thinking about sixty years later.
Every time we stopped for gas, she opened her purse and took out the folded bills Russ had given her. “Let me get this one,” she’d say. “Thirty-four dollars is thirty-four dollars.”
“Put it away, Grandma.”
“It’s not right, you paying for all this.”
“It’s not right you having to ask,” I said, and that was the closest I came that whole trip to saying anything about Russ out loud. She heard it. She put the money back in her purse and snapped the clasp.
We got to Amarillo at dusk and took a room off the interstate.
There was a steak place across the parking lot, and she ordered the small sirloin and ate every bite of it and half of my baked potato.
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She told me about Russ over pie. She did it the way she does hard things, looking at the table, smoothing her napkin, and saying it plain.
“His business note is past due at the bank,” she said. “The one he took out to buy the building and the inventory. It was a bad year, honey. Corn prices down, and the farmers he sells to held off on new pivots. They’re patching what they’ve got. He’s been carrying it since summer.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“No. Pam did, at Thanksgiving, in the kitchen. She thought I already knew.” Pam is Russ’s wife. She is a good woman who teaches second grade and makes the best green bean casserole in western Kansas. “She was scared. She said they might lose it all, the building, everything.”
“So he took your money to pay his note.”
Grandma didn’t flinch. “I think he took my money to buy himself some time. I think he told himself he’d send it to me in pieces, a little every month, and I’d never be short, and I’d never know.” She looked up at me. “And I think he told himself Velma would meet the bus in Phoenix, so it didn’t matter who drove me.”
“Grandma, he left you on a bench with forty dollars.”
“I know what he did, Callie. I was there.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “I’m not making excuses. I’m telling you why. There’s a difference, and you need to know it, because you’re going to be angry with him for a long time, and I want you to be angry at the right thing.”
I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know how.
That night she read her Bible by the lamp, the little one with the zipper cover, and I lay on the other bed and texted with Mike.
He sent me a picture of Ella asleep on the couch with the dog, and one of Sam holding up a drawing of a car with two stick people in it and the word Arizona across the top in red marker.
I showed the drawing to Grandma. She held my phone up close to her glasses for a long time, then handed it back and said, “You tell that boy his great-grandma is going to put that on Velma’s refrigerator.”
We left Amarillo at seven the next morning and crossed into New Mexico an hour later.
The land opened up wide and flat and tan, with mesas standing up at the edges of the world like furniture nobody had put away.