The Long Drive to Velma’s Driveway

Somewhere past Tucumcari, Grandma got quiet. I glanced over, and she was looking out at all that country with her hands folded on her purse.

Then, without saying anything, she reached across the console and took my right hand.

Her hand was warm now. It was small and soft and spotted, with the wedding ring Grandpa gave her in 1962 worn thin as a wire.

She held on, and after a few miles her head tipped against the window, and she was asleep.

She slept most of New Mexico like that, holding my hand. Through Santa Rosa, through Albuquerque traffic, up the long hill past the reservation lands toward Grants.

I drove one-handed for three hundred miles, and I did not let go once, not even for the gas station in Grants. I made her wake up first.

I have thought a lot about those hours since. The radio was off. The sun was coming in warm through the windshield.

Every so often her fingers would tighten on mine in her sleep, the way a baby’s will, and then go loose again.

I thought about all the times she had held my hand. Crossing Main Street in Hays to get a cherry phosphate at the drugstore.

At my dad’s funeral, when I was thirty and thought I was too old to need it. In the hospital the night Sam was born, when Mike had gone to move the car.

When she woke up near Gallup, she was humming. It took me a minute to place it. “It Is Well With My Soul.” She hummed the whole first verse, then looked over at me, a little embarrassed, and let go of my hand to fix her hair.

“Was I asleep long?”

“About three hundred miles, Grandma.”

“Well, that’s a waste of good scenery,” she said, and I laughed so hard I had to pull over.

We stayed in Gallup that night. In the morning she called Velma again and told her we’d be in by midafternoon.

Then she sat on the edge of the motel bed with her phone in her lap for a long while, not dialing anything.

“He’s called me four times,” she said. “Yesterday and this morning. I let it ring.”

“Do you want to call him back?”

“Not yet. When I’m sitting in Velma’s kitchen with my feet on the ground, I’ll call him. A thing like this ought to be said from a place, not from the side of the road.”

The last day was the prettiest.

We went through Holbrook and up into the high country, the snow on the ground again among the ponderosa pines near Flagstaff, then down the long grade on Interstate 17, dropping thousands of feet in an hour until the saguaros started showing up on the hillsides like people waving.

Grandma had never seen a saguaro. She made me slow down so she could look. “Your grandpa would not believe this,” she kept saying. “He would not believe a thing like that grows on its own.”

We came through Phoenix in the afternoon traffic and out east to Mesa.

By the time I turned onto Velma’s street, I had driven 1,050 miles from the Wichita bus station, by the odometer, plus the 540 to get there.

Velma was standing in her driveway. She had been watching for us.

She is a small, round woman with the same nose as Grandma and the same way of standing with her hands clasped at her waist, and she was waiting under the lemon tree with her phone in her hand.

The phone was ringing.