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pretended to have a heart attack when we were getting gas and I had to lay her out flat on the backseat and tell the woman in the Plymouth Voyager not to call 911 because my mother was a real kidder.
    The phone calls started Thursday night, three A.M.
    Dad was at a bar—drunk, sappy. “Now, Jenna girl, I want you to say a big hello to Sueann, the woman who’s changed my life.”
    Friday night, two-thirty.
    “Now, Jenna girl, you got to understand that your mother makes it hard for me to come around. It’s not that I don’t want to.”
    Saturday afternoon, 5:17.
    “Now, Jenna girl, I’m coming over and we’re going to have a talk like we used to and I’m going to bring a pizza and we’re going to catch up.”
    “No, Dad.”
    He didn’t like that so I lied and told him I was sick and had to get some sleep and maybe we could get together when I was feeling better.
    “Dad,” I said quietly, “are you all right?”
    Never better, he said, and over the receiver I heard the sound of shattering glass.
    Beer bottle, he explained.
    After that, I stopped answering the phone.
    “Did he ask about me?” Faith kept asking.
    Mom was storming around, saying how Dad would push himself on us for a month or so every few years to make up for all the years he wasn’t around. She confronted him the next time he called. He asked for me; she wouldn’t put me on. He blew up, saying no one gave him a chance. He’s coming over to talk to his daughter!
    Not when you’re drunk,
Mom shouted back. And, by the way, you have
two
daughters, and let’s not forget you haven’t sent a child support payment in months!
    I came into the kitchen as she slammed down the phone. She was steeling herself like she did at the hospital when a tough case came in.
    Mom, please let me go.
    “I need to get out of here,” I said. “I need to go to Texas.”
    Mom leaned against the wall, studied my face.
    “Okay,” she said finally. “Okay.”

CHAPTER 6
    I had two days to pack, which was close to impossible since no one could tell me what to bring for six weeks on the road with a fussy rich person. There was so much to do, but packing wasn’t as important as seeing my grandmother.
    I walked into her room at the Shady Oaks Nursing Home. She was sitting in a green vinyl chair looking out the window at nothing in particular, holding her old sewing kit in her lap that Mom brought from her shop. One side of her hair was matted like she’d been sleeping on it. She was wearing the pink sweater I gave her two Christmases ago. She never went anywhere without that sweater.
    I held out the bunch of daisies I’d brought her. She smiled at the flowers. She used to have a field of them behind her house in Wisconsin; we’d pick them fresh every day when I visited. Before she got Alzheimer’s, her eyes had been a crackling blue. Now they were like looking into muddy water.
    “I’m going on an adventure, Grandma. I’m driving to Texas.”
    “Texas.” She said the word like it was a person she was trying to remember.
    “I’m going to eat barbecue and learn the two-step and wear a cowboy hat and touch an oil rig.”
    “Oh,” said Gladys, her roommate, “I been to Texas. Never seen such a place—sky so big, land so wide. You tell Texas hello for old Gladys.”
    “I will. I’ll bring you back a piece of the sky.”
    Gladys laughed and jiggled the plastic blue bracelets I gave her at Christmas.
    “Texas,” my grandmother said flatly, but she took my hand when she said it. I sat there with her for the longest time not saying anything. I opened the quilted top of her sewing kit that had been the beginning of so many projects. Grandma touched the antique thimbles, the threads in every color, the fine scissors from France.
    “Do you remember that rainbow skirt you made for me, Grandma? It had eight different fabrics, each a different color. It was my favorite thing to wear.”
    I took her big scrapbook out of her dresser drawer. When she knew the disease