We’re just taking her to lunch. That was what my father told me Thursday morning. 3 hours later, a nursing home called. Grandma was sitting in the lobby with her coat still buttoned, her suitcase
beside her chair. My parents had brought her in, signed the papers, and left. Nobody came back. I drove 190 miles to get her. She didn’t cry when she saw me. She didn’t ask what they’d told the
staff or whether I’d called them. She simply walked outside, climbed into my truck, and buckled her seatbelt. Then she said, “Don’t call them. I’ll tell you where to drive.”
I thought she wanted to go home. She didn’t. She gave me a road, then a turn, then one name. I thought I was rescuing Grandma from what my parents had done that morning. I
had no idea she was taking me straight to what they’d been afraid of for years. My name is Ms. Charlie Leeker. Charline on the paperwork. 19 years hauling grain out of Wichita for a small carrier.
Hopper bottom trailer, South Central Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle. I’ve never once taken a northwest run. There’s a reason for that, and I’ll get to it. Stay with me on this one.
If you want, tell me what road you’re on while you’re listening. I like knowing who’s out there because before I can tell you the name she gave me, you need to understand what I believed
for 22 years and how completely I believed it. Every day of those 19 years, I’ve had a clipboard riding on my right thigh. Bills of lading, scale slips, other people’s names on other people’s paper,
and my job is to move what’s under the name from one place to another without losing any of it. I want you to remember the clipboard. It comes back. The name she gave me wasn’t my father’s.
I’ll get to the name. It arrived that evening at the curb after everything else. What came was a phone lying face up on the seat beside that clipboard buzzing with an area code from the other end of
the state. I was in a loading yard south of Wichita a little after 3:00. Air conditioning running, 40,000 lb of soybean meal behind me. Is this Charlene Liker? I’m calling from Meadowlark. It’s about
Delphine Liker. Nadine Fanninsteel gave me her name and her department in the same breath. The way people do when they’ve made this call before. Respite stay, she said, one week. Prepaid.
There’s a mistake, I said. My dad would have called me. The paperwork was signed at 11:40 this morning, ma’am. I sat up. The clipboard slid off my thigh onto the floorboard and I let it lay there.
She won’t go up to her room, Nadine said. She won’t take her coat off. She’s been in the lobby since noon. I looked at the dash clock. Then why am I hearing about it now? Nadine went quiet.
Not the the quiet of somebody looking something up. The other kind. Because she didn’t ask us to call anybody until 3:00. She waited 3 hours before she asked them to call me.
I left the clipboard on the floorboard the whole way. It slid every time I braked and I never once picked it up. I-135 north to Salina, then I-70 west into the sun. 3 hours.
My hands were wet on the wheel the first hour and stiff the second. And somewhere past Ellsworth, my neck locked up so bad I had to roll my shoulder against the seat back to get it loose. Out there,
the twin spires of St. Fidelis come up out of the wheat from 11 miles off and that’s the whole operating system of Ellis County right there. People see your place before they see
you, and they’ve already decided what it says about you. Here’s what I believed. My grandfather, Alois Lieker, died in February of 2004. I was 22. Three weeks after the funeral, my father
took me aside in the machine shed and told me grandma had settled the ground on him and my brother Kurt. That it was all handled. And that there wasn’t anything out here for me.
He wasn’t cruel about it. That’s the part that stuck. He put a hand on my shoulder. Grandma’s taken care of all that. You go take care of yours. So, I did. I went and took care of mine.