The first day was all desert and quiet.

Up through Payson. Over the Mogollon Rim, with the pine trees and the red rocks. Across to the interstate.

Ardis knitted for about an hour. A blue sweater for our granddaughter, Emma. Then she put it away in her bag and just watched the country go by out the window.

We stopped that first night at a motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. It had a neon sign out front shaped like a big red arrow.

I couldn’t sleep.

I lay there on that lumpy mattress listening to the semi trucks going by out on the interstate. And I did arithmetic I didn’t want to do.

Six hundred dollars a month.

January. February. March.

Eighteen hundred dollars. Somebody’s hard-earned paychecks. Handed over to my son for a room in my house. While I was paying the property taxes on it.

I lay there and stared at the water stain on the motel ceiling until the sky started getting gray.

The second day, we crossed the Texas panhandle in a hard wind that pushed the Toyota around the whole way. Then up into Kansas. Flat and brown as far as you could see.

Somewhere past Liberal, Ardis said the first thing she’d said in two hundred miles.

“Do you remember when he was eight? And he brought home that dog?”

“Biscuit,” I said.

“He hid that dog in the garage for four whole days. Fed it his own lunch meat out of his lunchbox. He was so afraid you’d make him take it back to the farm.”

“I didn’t make him take it back.”

“No,” she said. “But he was afraid you would. He was always afraid of that, Gordon. More than anything else in the whole world, he was afraid of disappointing you.”

I didn’t answer that.

I didn’t have an answer for it.

I just drove.