The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

“Is it really today?” she asked.

“It’s really today.”

“Well,” she said. “Then let’s not stand around the laundry.”

I lifted her into the front seat of the Subaru myself, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and she weighed nothing. I buckled her in and set the portable machine on the floorboard between her feet, with two spare batteries in my tote bag.

Roz stood in the glow of the door light and watched us pull out. She did not wave. She put one hand flat against her chest, the way you do for a flag.

Route 58 runs east out of Halifax County through South Hill and Emporia and Franklin before it finally lets you down toward the coast, and it is three and a half hours if you do not stop. We stopped once, at a drive-through in South Hill for a sausage biscuit, which Ludie ate half of and called the best thing she had tasted in a year.

She sang hymns for most of the rest of it, a thread of a voice that never lost the tune.

At a quarter to eight my phone started buzzing in the cup holder. It said Lyle Brannock.

I let it ring. It rang again at eight, and again at eight-fifteen. When the fourth call came, I pulled onto a wide stretch of shoulder past Courtland and answered it, because I did not want him thinking I was ashamed.

“Where is she?” Lyle said.

“She’s beside me. She’s had a biscuit. Her oxygen is fine.”

“Marcy read the book at seven. Joelle, bring her back right now.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’re going to lose your job.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I know. I’ll have her back by nine tonight. Dee Whitlow has her phone on.”

I heard him breathe. I thought he was going to shout, and I had my answer ready, and what he said instead was, “Is she warm enough?”

“She’s got her hat and two blankets.”

He did not say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Call me if her breathing changes,” and hung up.

“Was that the young man?” Ludie asked.

“That was Mr. Brannock.”

“Lyle Wayne Brannock.” She said it with a little laugh in her chest. “I put that boy off my bus exactly zero times. He sat three seats back with a bloody nose in the fall of 1983, and I never said a word.”

I looked at her.

“He used to put his lunch sack on his lap and hold it with both hands like somebody might take it,” she said. “Poor little thing. Don’t you be hard on him, Joelle. Rules grow out of somewhere.”

I had no idea what she meant. I only thought she was wandering a little, the way the very old do.

We came into Virginia Beach a little after noon, down Independence Boulevard through all the strip malls and hotel signs, and I parked in the municipal lot at Fourteenth Street. It was a bright, windy October day with a scatter of clouds and the kind of cold that tastes like salt.

The boardwalk was nearly empty.

I got her into the transport chair, with the blankets and the hat and the oxygen bag hung off the handles, and wheeled her up the ramp.

There is a place at the top of the ramp where the buildings fall away and the sky opens up, and you see all of it at once. The sand, and the long gray-green slope of the water, and the line out at the edge of the world where it turns into sky.