The Bus Seat She Gave Back

Corning

We came into Corning at a quarter to seven that evening, with the light gone and the temperature down to thirty-six. The town is one grain elevator, one stoplight, a courthouse square and a Casey’s. Mom pressed her forehead to the window like a girl.

“That is the Super 8,” I said. “Eighty-nine dollars a night. Bob said not to be cheap.”

I called Tammy at eight, from the parking lot, with the wind coming off the bean fields.

She answered on the first ring. “Is she all right? Did she eat? Did she take the evening ones with food?”

“She ate a pork tenderloin the size of a hubcap and she took them with her dessert.”

I heard Tammy breathe out. It went on a long time.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Tell her good night from me.”

“I will.”

“Donna.” She stopped. “Is she, does she, hate me?”

I thought about Mom in the truck, past Topeka, saying she was not going to be small about it.

“No,” I said. “But she knows what you did. And Tammy, I am going to tell you something I would not tell you if I did not think you could hear it.

You didn’t have to hide it. You could have sat down with her at her own table and said you were scared. She would have listened. She listens to everything. That is half of why you are so tired.”

The line was quiet.

“I know,” Tammy said, very small. “I saw the can, in August, when I was straightening the hutch. I knew exactly what it was.”

I did not know what to say to that, so I said good night.

Saturday we did nothing. That was the whole plan. Mom slept until nine, and ate eggs at the Casey’s, and we drove out County Road P and looked at the farm where she was born.

A hog confinement stood where the barn had been and a stranger’s grain bins stood where the garden was. She looked at it for a full minute with her hands in her lap.

“The well was right there,” she said. “Edna went down it on a rope once to get our bucket. Fifteen years old. She said, Reenie, it is our bucket.”

In the afternoon Mom had me find her a handkerchief at the Dollar General, a plain white one, and she held it in her fist the rest of the day. At dusk she asked me to help her practice the walk.

The motel hallway was thirty-one steps from her door to the ice machine. She walked it six times, cane and no cane, and the sixth time she did it with her head up and her shoulders back and a look on her face I had last seen in a photograph of her at twenty-two.

“Don’t hold my arm,” she said. “I am going to walk up that aisle myself.”

“I will be right behind you.”

“Not behind. Beside.” She smiled at me. “You can stay close. But I want to be seen doing it.”

I had not known until then what she wanted. She did not want to be carried to her sister. She wanted to arrive.