Benediction (Plainsong #3)(55)

I’ll have to find out. Let’s get you cleaned up first.

She helped him from the bed and he hobbled into the bathroom in his sagging pajamas and stood like a child at the hospital commode while she peeled off his pants and the diaper. She handed him a washcloth to clean himself and afterward she washed his skinny behind. He was shaking. Goose bumps appeared on his flanks and legs.

Do you want to sit down here for a while? she said. See if you can go some more?

Yeah. I better.

She went out, giving him his privacy, and looked out the front window to the street and came back and helped him put on a new diaper and clean sweatpants and a cardigan sweater. He came out of the bathroom shuffling, sliding his feet in his slippers, using his cane, and moved to his chair by the window.

The car isn’t here, Lorraine said. I just looked. She must have gone to the store.

She’s been gone too long for that. You want to ask Berta May if she knows where she is? You’ll have to go over there. She don’t answer the phone every time.

Next door Lorraine stood on the front porch and when Berta May came to the door they went inside the house and Berta May said she hadn’t seen her mother this morning. Then Alice came in and they asked her and she told them she was riding her bike when Mrs. Lewis came up in the car and said, Now you be careful out here. Are you watching for cars? And I said I was watching.

Then what?

Then she drove away.

Do you remember what she was wearing? Lorraine said.

She had a dress on.

You’re sure.

Yes. A blue one.

Back at home Lorraine began to look around more carefully and she found the note now that had blown off or fallen off under the little stand where the phone was located.

It was written in brief neat script, with no salutation and no closing, just the one line. I went to find Frank.



She had gotten up early from the bed when it was just turning light outside. Dad looked gray in the dim light, breathing slow and hard, his mouth belling out when he exhaled, making a rattling kind of noise. She removed her nightgown and pulled the dress off the hanger in the dark closet where she’d hung it the night before, and put it on and carried her shoes out to the kitchen, turning the light on there, and sat down on a kitchen chair to tie her shoes. She put bread in the toaster and started coffee, then went back into the bathroom to wash her face and apply a little lipstick to her mouth, watching herself in the mirror, her deeply wrinkled face, and brushed her thick short white hair. When she went back to the kitchen, the coffee was ready and she filled a thermos and spread butter on the toast, put it in a plastic bag, and took the thermos and her purse and went silently out the front door into the beautiful cool Sunday morning.

In the street she stopped to talk to Alice on her bicycle and then headed west on U.S. 34, toward Brush, and passed Fort Morgan on the interstate and went on toward Denver. Along the way she drank the coffee and ate the toast.

She was all right until she got to Denver. But then there was a lot of road construction and they had the men at work even on a Sunday morning. She got lost in the detours and roadblocks and ended up in the north side of the city. It was half an hour before she had any idea where she was at all.

She pulled into a corner gas station. There were no other cars at the pumps or parked at the cinder-block office but she could see an old man sitting behind the counter. She got out and locked the car and looked all around and went inside. The man looked up. He wasn’t as old as she had thought. It was just that he had gray hair, which was combed back on both sides of his head, with a wave pulled up above his face in the way the boys used to do when she was young. He’d been reading a newspaper spread out on the counter.

Good morning, she said.

Yeah. Morning.

I’m just going to tell you right out. I’m lost. All that construction turned me in the wrong direction. I’m trying to get downtown.

Lady, he said, you don’t ever want to tell people you’re lost. You don’t know what they might do to you.

Oh, I don’t think people would do anything to me. Look at me here. I’m an old woman. She stood in the middle of the little room watching him.

You never know, he said. You can’t tell.

All right, I won’t say it again. But can you help me or not, do you think?

Yeah. I can help you.

He got up and went over to the rack on the wall next to the entrance and took down a map of Denver.

Oh, she said. Do you have to do all that?

What else am I going to do?

He went around to his side of the counter and opened the map and showed her where she was and pointed out the streets to take downtown.

But I can’t drive according to maps, she said.

He looked at her. Why not?

I don’t know. I just can’t. It’s the way I look at things and the way my mind works.

Well, can you just remember, if I tell you?

No. Not like I used to.

I don’t know what I’m going to do then. What do you want me to do?

I want you to tell me slowly and I’ll write it down. I’ll take the turns you say, left or right, from off the paper.

But I got this map here for you. It’d be the same thing.

No, a map wouldn’t do any good.

Well, he said. If that’s what you want.

Then he told her very patiently and she wrote on the blank side of a flyer for a car auction all the directions he gave her, and folded the paper and put it in her purse.