The Grandmother on the Old Faithful Bench

“Mom, I have to ask you something hard, and I need you not to make it harder.”

That was how my son opened the call, on a Sunday night in September, one week before the trip that was supposed to be for my seventieth birthday.

I was standing at the sink with a dish towel over my shoulder. Lowell was out in the garage with the radio going, and the dog was asleep on the rug by the back door.

“All right,” I said. “Ask.”

Eric took a breath I could hear through the phone. He has done that since he was little, a big breath before the bad news, like a boy about to go under water.

“You know Megan’s mom has been having a hard time since Dale passed.”

“I know,” I said, and I did. Dale had gone in June, quick, his heart. Sandy had been married to him forty-four years. I sent a card and a pan of scalloped potatoes, and I meant both.

“Megan’s been worried sick about her being alone this fall. The house is so quiet. She doesn’t eat. She called Megan at two in the morning last week just to hear somebody’s voice.”

“That’s hard,” I said. “That’s real hard.”

“So Megan asked if her mom could come to Yellowstone with us.”

I set the plate I was holding in the rack. It was the blue one with the chip on the rim. I remember looking at that chip like it had something to tell me.

“The cabin only has the one extra bed, Mom,” he said. “And with all the luggage, the van’s full. There’s just not room for both of you.”

“We’ll pay you back your half,” Eric said quickly. “The fourteen hundred. I’ll write you a check this week. And we’ll do something for your birthday when we get home, a supper, something nice.”

“So Sandy’s taking my seat,” I said.

“It’s not like that.”

“I’m only asking so I understand it right.”

He was quiet a long moment. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She’s taking your seat.”

Here is how that trip came to be.

When I was nine years old, back in 1965, my dad came in from the field one night in July and said that as soon as the beans were in, we were going to Yellowstone.

He had a picture of Old Faithful torn out of a magazine and pinned over the cream separator.

He said we would sleep in the car and eat bologna sandwiches and watch that geyser go up like the whole earth letting out its breath. I believed him the way you believe your dad when you are nine.

Two weeks later a hailstorm came across our quarter and laid the beans flat in about eleven minutes. Nobody went anywhere that year, or the next one, or ever. The picture stayed on the wall until the paper went yellow and curled.

I never held it against Dad. A farm is a farm. But I kept that picture in the back of my mind for sixty years, the way you keep a coin in a coat pocket and touch it now and then.

Lowell and I were married in 1977. He worked for the county road department for thirty-one years, and I kept books for the implement dealer and then the co-op.

We raised Eric in a ranch house on the east side of Mitchell, two blocks from the water tower.