The Bus Seat She Gave Back

Friday

We pulled out of Mom’s driveway at ten past five, in the black cold, with the heater roaring and Bob’s coffee thermos between us on the bench seat. Mom wore her winter coat though it would be sixty degrees by noon. Her hands were folded on her purse and she held herself so straight that I almost said something.

“Are you all right?” I said instead.

“I am sitting in a truck at five in the morning with my daughter,” she said. “I have not felt this way since the day your father took me to Galveston.”

By seven the sun was up over the wheat stubble north of Enid. By nine we were across the Kansas line and the country had flattened out into that big pale quiet that gets into your chest. Mom pointed at everything.

Milo stalks bent and rust colored in the fields, a cattle yard with two hundred head, a man on a green tractor working the ground behind a combine, a farm sale sign on a fence post, a church so small it could have been a granary.

We stopped in Wichita to walk, and again at a gas station in Emporia where she bought a pack of peanut butter crackers and ate them one at a time with great ceremony. I counted out her noon pills and watched her swallow them. She watched me watching, and she smiled.

“Tammy gave you the sheet,” she said.

“She did.”

“She is not a bad girl.” Mom looked out at the Flint Hills going by gold. “I want you to know I know that. She loves me the way you love somebody when you are scared of losing them. It comes out as a rule.”

“It came out as a lie,” I said. “She told the whole church you were too frail.”

“Well,” Mom said. “That is a different thing, and I am not going to forget it. But I am not going to be small about it, either.”

I did not know then how much that sentence would matter. I only knew it was the most dignified thing anyone had said in four days.

That was when she told me about the Folgers can, somewhere past Topeka, and I had to put on my blinker and pull onto the shoulder for a minute until I could see the road.