Grandma pressed the page to her chest. “We are going to see him,” she said.
“How soon?” my mother asked.
“Tomorrow.”
The Seven-Hour Drive
The next morning, I drove Grandma while Michael followed behind us in his own car. The trip took nearly seven hours. At first, Grandma just watched the road pass by without saying much of anything. Then we passed a sign for a small town along the highway.
“Andrew taught me to whistle near a creek by that town,” she said, out of nowhere.
I glanced over at her. “You can whistle?”
“Not anymore,” she said. She tried anyway — the sound came out thin and uneven, nothing like a real whistle — and she laughed, genuinely laughed, for the first time since Grandpa died.
She told me more as the miles passed. When she and Andrew were kids, they used to sneak out through a pantry window and walk two miles to a dance hall neither of them could afford tickets for, listening to the music from just outside the building instead. “Andrew would copy the trumpet parts on the walk home,” she said.
“Did your parents know?” I asked.
“My mother probably did,” Grandma said. “She believed silence was the same thing as permission.”
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