I got a CDL and I got good at it. I want to be clear about one thing because it matters later. I did not disappear on my grandmother. I saw her four, five times a year.
The coffee counter at the Dillons in Hays, the church parking lot. Once at a funeral dinner where we split a piece of cherry pie because they’d run out of plates. I called her every February on my
grandfather’s birthday. Every year. Without being reminded. What I stayed away from was the farm. 22 years and I never drove down that section road. Not once. I told myself it was because there was
nothing out there for me. I had believed a man who had no reason to lie to me. And I had never gone and looked. For 22 years, I thought I was the one who didn’t get picked.
I put the clipboard in the door pocket before I went in. The way you square things away before you walk into a room you don’t know. Meadowlark Assisted Living sits on Vine
Street with a covered drive out front. Nadine had pulled the suitcase behind the desk so nobody would move it. She slid a paper across to me first. Resident information sheet under emergency contact
in that slanted tight old lady cursive I’ve been getting birthday cards in my whole life. My name my cell number no area code missing no digit wrong and on the resident line her own signature.
Nobody wrote those for her. The suitcase had two church dresses in it no reading glasses, no pill organizer. Whoever packed it did not know one thing about her.
“She wouldn’t take her coat off,” Nadine said handing it over. “She told me she wasn’t staying.” Grandma stood up, buttoned the last button and walked out to the truck.
She climbed up on the step rail without letting me take her elbow. She sat down. She pulled the belt across and it clicked and she folded her hands in her lap like we were going to the store.
“Don’t call them. I’ll tell you where to drive.” I said “Ma’am?” She didn’t answer that. She gave me a road then a turn then “Take the section road north out of town.
I don’t want your truck going past his house.” Then she said “Marvin Dryling 6:00 in the morning.” Marvin Dryling was 6:00 in the morning. Between then and 6:00 in the morning
there was a house. The mailbox at the top of the road was stuffed. One day of mail and a stack of flyers jammed in on top of it. I pulled it out because that’s what you
do and I carried it in under my arm. The porch light was on. Nobody had come back to turn it off. Inside everything was exactly the way you leave a house when you’re coming home in 2 hours.
A coffee cup in the sink with a ring dried in the bottom her reading glasses folded on the kitchen table the pill organizer on on window sill with Friday and Saturday and Sunday
still full. I stood in the middle of that kitchen and the first thing that got me was the smell. Old cooking oil and the vinyl of the oilcloth on the table. Warm, a little sweet.
I had never smelled it in my life. 22 years of Dylan’s and church parking lots and I had never once stood in my grandmother’s kitchen. She went straight to the coffee. Filter, scoop, scoop,
half a scoop. She talked while she did it about how the sugar was in the yellow tin now because the other lid didn’t seat right anymore. I let her finish. Then I sat down at the oilcloth and
asked it as carefully as I knew how. And it came out sounding like an apology instead of a question. Grandma, Mom and Dad told me you signed the ground over to Dad and Kurt. Back in ’04.
She set the cup down and asked, “Who told you that?” She never did answer her own question. She stood up and took me into the front room instead. There’s the roll-top desk in there that
came from her mother. She rolled it up and stepped back and let me look. Tax receipts banded by year, a savings passbook, a shoe box of letters, a bundle of envelopes with a rubber band around it.