The Long Drive to Velma’s Driveway

I pulled in and turned off the car, and I watched Velma look down at the screen and then up at us, and her mouth went into a straight line.

She answered it with Grandma and me climbing out of my car, close enough that I could hear her plain as day.

“Hello, Russell.”

I couldn’t hear his side. I didn’t need to. He was calling to ask if his mother had gotten off the bus in Phoenix.

The bus line had told him the rescheduled bus came in that morning, and he’d been calling his mother for two days, and she hadn’t answered.

Velma looked right at her sister, standing in her driveway in her long camel coat with her purse on her arm.

“She didn’t come on any bus, Russell,” Velma said. “Her granddaughter drove her. From Wichita. Callie drove down from Iowa in the night and picked her up off a bench in the bus station, and she’s been driving her for three days.”

There was a long silence. Velma listened. Her face didn’t change.

“No,” she said. “She’s right here. But she’s going to call you back. She’s going to sit down in my kitchen and call you back, and you’re going to pick up when she does.” Then she ended the call, put the phone in her sweater pocket, and opened her arms.

The two of them held onto each other in that driveway for a long time. Two old women, 83 and 80, rocking a little side to side, not saying anything at all.

I carried the brown suitcase in by myself so I wouldn’t cry in front of them.

Velma’s kitchen was small and bright, with a window over the sink that looked out at the lemon tree.

She had a pot of coffee on and a coffee cake on the counter with a dish towel over it. It looked so much like Grandma’s kitchen in Hays that I had to stand in the doorway a minute.

Grandma took off her coat and hung it on the back of a chair, just so. She sat down at the table. She took a breath and folded her hands.

“Velma, I’d like a pencil, please,” she said. “And a piece of paper. Not a little one.”

Velma brought her a yellow legal pad and a pencil from the drawer by the phone.

Grandma smoothed the top sheet flat with the side of her hand. Then she picked up her phone and dialed her son.

He picked up on the first ring.

“Mom,” he said, and I could hear him because the kitchen was so quiet. “Mom, I can explain.”

“I know you can, Russell,” she said. “And you will. But first you’re going to listen to me, and you’re going to get a pencil, because I’m only going to say this once.”

I heard him say something. Then a drawer opening, far away in Garden City.

“I am in Velma’s kitchen in Mesa, Arizona,” Grandma said. “I did not get here on the bus you put me on. I got here because your niece left her job and her children and drove nine hours through a snowstorm to pick me up off a bench in Wichita at one o’clock in the morning.”

She tapped the pencil once on the table. “She has driven me every mile since. She would not take one dollar from me for gas.”

She let that sit. Velma and I didn’t breathe.