Where I'm Calling From

too, Jill. I’m going to miss both of you.”
    Jill sips from her coffee and nods. Then she says, “I hope you have a safe trip back and find the place you’re looking for at the end of the road.”
    “When I get settled—and this is my last move, so help me—I hope you’ll come and visit,” my mother says. She looks at me and waits to be reassured.
    “We will,” I say. But even as I say it I know it isn’t true. My life caved in on me down there, and I won’t be going back.
    “I wish you could have been happier here,” Jill says. “I wish you’d been able to stick it out or something.
    You know what? Your son is worried sick about you.”
    “Jill,” I say.
    But she gives her head a little shake and goes on. “Sometimes he can’t sleep over it. He wakes up sometimes in the night and says, ‘I can’t sleep. I’m thinking about my mother.’ There,” she says and looks at me. “I’ve said it. But it was on my mind.”
    “How do you think I must feel?” my mother says. Then she says, “Other women my age can be happy.
    Why can’t I be like other women? All I want is a house and a town to live in that will make me happy.
    That isn’t a crime, is it? I hope not. I hope I’m not asking too much out of life.” She puts her cup on the floor next to her chair and waits for Jill to tell her she isn’t asking for too much. But Jill doesn’t say anything, and in a minute my mother begins to outline her plans to be happy.
    After a time Jill lowers her eyes to her cup and has some more coffee. I can tell she’s stopped listening.
    But my mother keeps talking anyway. The crows work their way through the grass in the front yard. I hear the mower howl and then thud as it picks up a clump of grass in the blade and comes to a stop. In a minute, after several tries, Larry gets it going again. The crows fly off, back to their wire. Jill picks at a fingernail. My mother is saying that the secondhand-furniture dealer is coming around the next morning to collect the things she isn’t going to send on the bus or carry with her in the car. The table and chairs, TV, sofa, and bed are going with the dealer. But he’s told her he doesn’t have any use for the card table, so my mother is going to throw it out unless we want it.
    “We’ll take it,” I say. Jill looks over. She starts to say something but changes her mind.
    I will drive the boxes to the Greyhound station the next afternoon and start them on the way to California. My mother will spend the last night with us, as arranged. And then, early the next morning, two days from now, she’ll be on her way.
    She continues to talk. She talks on and on as she describes the trip she is about to make. She’ll drive until four o’clock in the afternoon and then take a motel room for the night. She figures to make Eugene by dark. Eugene is a nice town—she stayed there once before, on the way up here. When she leaves the motel, she’ll leave at sunrise and should, if God is looking out for her, be in California that afternoon.
    And God is looking out for her, she knows he is. How else explain her being kept around on the face of the earth? He has a plan for her. She’s been praying a lot lately. She’s been praying for me, too.
    “Why are you praying for him?” Jill wants to know.
    “Because I feel like it. Because he’s my son,” my mother says. “Is there anything the matter with that?
    Don’t we all need praying for sometimes? Maybe some people don’t. I don’t know. What do I know anymore?” She brings a hand to her forehead and rearranges some hair that’s come loose from a pin.
    The mower sputters off, and pretty soon we see Larry go around the house pulling the hose. He sets the hose out and then goes slowly back around the house to turn the water on. The sprinkler begins to turn.
    My mother starts listing the ways she imagines Larry has wronged her since she’s been in the house. But now I’m not listening, either. I am thinking how she is about to go down the highway again, and nobody can reason with her or do anything to stop her. What can I do? I can’t tie her up, or commit her, though it may come to that eventually. I worry for her, and she is a heartache to me. She is all the family I have left. I’m sorry she didn’t like it here and wants to leave. But I’m never going back to California. And when that’s clear to me I understand something else, too. I under stand that after she leaves I’m probably never going to see