The Bus Seat She Gave Back

Edna

My aunt Edna is Mom’s sister. She is four years older, which at their ages is a different century, and she is the reason Mom is who she is.

They grew up on a hardscrabble farm outside Lenox, Iowa, in a house with no running water until 1953. Edna braided Mom’s hair every school morning for nine years. When their mother got sick, it was Edna, fourteen, who ran the house.

When Mom met Dad at a dance in Creston and said she was moving to Oklahoma, it was Edna who drove her to the bus station and pressed into her hand the thirty dollars she had saved from detasseling corn.

Edna married a good man named Floyd and stayed in Iowa. For sixty years the sisters talked on the telephone every Sunday night at seven, and they saw each other maybe eleven times. A wedding. Three funerals. A reunion. The last time had been twelve years ago.

Then in September the Sunday calls changed. Edna’s daughter Cheryl started answering. Edna was resting. Edna was tired. In October Cheryl told me, privately, that the doctors had said weeks, maybe a couple of months, heart and kidneys both, and that Edna had stopped getting out of bed except for church.

“She will not miss church,” Cheryl said. “It is her one good hour. Her chair is parked in the aisle at the third pew on the right, and she is awake and she is herself from ten to eleven on Sunday morning. The rest of the week she sleeps.”

I had called Cheryl Thursday night, after the diner, and told her the whole thing. There was a long pause on her end.

“Don’t come to the house,” Cheryl said finally. “She has bad days, and on the bad ones she cries when she thinks about Irene, because she knows she can’t make the trip. If you walk in Saturday she may not understand what is happening. Let her see her in church. Let her see her where she is strong.”

“You want it to be a surprise.”

“I want it to be a gift,” Cheryl said. “She has been praying for this since August. She does not think the Lord will give it to her.”

So I told Mom, at the gas station in Emporia, with the engine ticking, because it was her sister and her visit and I was done with people deciding things for her.

“Cheryl wants it to be a surprise at church Sunday,” I said. “That is her plan, and I think it is a good one. But it is yours. If you want to see her tonight, I will turn this truck toward the house right now.”

Mom thought a long while, with a cracker in her fingers.

“No,” she said. “I like the church.”

“All right.”

“Donna.” She reached over and took my hand off the wheel. “Thank you for asking me.”

That was all. But I knew what it cost her to say it, and what it said about the last four days.