I missed the bottom step of the porch three times in October. Each time, I blamed the slipperiness of the old pine treads or the dimness of the bulb hanging above the screen door. Arthur used to tell me I was moving too fast, but Arthur has been buried in the churchyard behind the Methodist hall since the spring of fourteen, and nobody else was around to check my pace.
Sixty years behind the wheel of a station wagon, a Ford pickup, and finally my little blue sedan without a single speeding ticket, a single dent from a parking lot pole, or a single officer tapping his flashlight against my window. You build a rhythm with asphalt. You know how the tires hum differently when you drift onto the shoulder of Route 14. You know that the gravel near the grain elevator drifts across the white line after a hard wind.
I figured seventy-nine was just a number on a birthday card my daughter Martha sent from Omaha with a ten-dollar bill tucked inside. The state of Nebraska didn’t care about my birthdays. They cared about whether my eyes could catch a red light before the truck behind me did.
The Department of Motor Vehicles office in town smells like floor wax and damp wool coats. It sits right across from the car wash where the giant black rubber strips slap against windshields all day long.
I drove my sedan there at 8:40 in the morning on a Tuesday, easing the bumper into the blue lines of the handicapped spot because my right knee had started giving me trouble whenever I pressed down on the brake pedal too hard.
The clerk behind the high counter was a young man with a name tag that read Caleb. His hair was parted so straight it looked like it had been drawn on with a pencil. He handed me the pink renewal form and a stubby yellow pencil with the eraser chewed down to the metal.
“Fill out the top half, ma’am,” he said without looking up from his computer screen. “Sign and date the bottom. Then take a seat in the yellow chairs.”
I sat down on the vinyl cushion. It was split right down the middle, leaking a little bit of yellow foam that tickled the back of my thigh through my stockings. I filled out the form, but my hand kept shaking in a way that made my letters look like the tracks of a wet spider. I crossed out my middle name twice before I got the spelling right.
When my number came up on the little plastic box above the door, I stood up and walked over to the vision screening booth. It was an old grey metal box on a stand, shaped like an owl with two round glass eyes.
The examiner was a woman named Brenda. I had known her mother from the garden club back before the club dissolved into three ladies meeting at the Dairy Queen on Thursdays. She didn’t smile when she adjusted the chin rest for me.
“Cover your left eye, Clara,” she said. Her voice had the flat, practiced tone of someone who had said the same thing eight thousand times that month. “Read the third line down for me.”
“T, H, 4, F, 9,” I said.
“Now the right.”
I switched my palm to my other eye. The letters on the card inside the metal box seemed to blur together into a grey smudge. I blinked, hoping the bulb inside the machine would brighten up. It stayed dull and yellow.
“Try again, Clara,” Brenda said. Her pen tapped once against the edge of the metal housing.
“I can see the big ones,” I told her. My mouth felt dry, like I’d been eating saltines without water. “The middle ones are kind of dancing around. Is there dust on the glass?”
Brenda didn’t answer. She reached out and pulled the metal box closer to her side of the counter. She didn’t look at my eyes anymore. She looked at the pink form I had filled out with the chewed-up yellow pencil.
“Sit down right here in this chair for a second,” she said, pointing to a metal folding chair beside her desk. “Don’t go out to the car. Just wait.”
I sat down. Through the window, I watched a grey delivery van back into the loading dock behind the hardware store. The driver had a cigarette tucked behind his ear and he was whistling while he unlatched the back doors. I wondered how long Martha would wait for me to call and tell her I had my new license tucked into my purse.
A man in a navy blue blazer with brass buttons came out from the back office. He had a clipboard pressed against his stomach like a shield. His name tag said Supervisor Miller, though everyone in the county just called him Miller because his family had run the grain elevators for three generations before they sold out to the conglomerate from Kansas City.
He didn’t sit down. He stood right over me, looking down past the bridge of his nose.
“Clara,” he said. He used that slow, careful voice people reserve for folks standing at the edge of an open grave. “We’ve got a little situation with your renewal.”
“I missed a letter,” I said. My fingers were hooked into the tweed fabric of my handbag, twisting the strap around my knuckles until the leather groaned. “My left eye has always been a little lazy since I had the shingles back in ninety-eight.”
“It’s not just the letters,” Miller said. He didn’t smile. He set the clipboard down on Brenda’s desk. “For eight months you’ve clipped door frames, Clara. The state troopers called us about your bumper last week after you backed into the light pole behind the hardware store. You didn’t even stop.”
“I didn’t feel anything,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like paper tearing.
“I know you didn’t,” he said softly. “Ma’am, I can’t let you drive home today. I’m sorry. Is there someone we can call?”
My ears started ringing. It wasn’t a loud sound, just a high, thin whistle like the wind blowing across the top of an empty milk jug left out in the yard. The DMV office seemed to tilt sideways for half a second before it settled back onto the linoleum floor.
“My car is right out there,” I said, pointing toward the window where the delivery van was pulling away. “In the blue spot.”
“We’ll have it towed into the lot behind the station so it’s safe,” Miller said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black phone. “Who are we calling? Your daughter in Omaha?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head so hard my neck ached. “Don’t call Martha. She has her grandchildren over on Tuesdays. Call my granddaughter Maya. She lives over by the lumber mill.”
Maya was twenty-six. She worked the front desk at the veterinary clinic on Elm Street, cleaning cages and handing out tick medicine to farmers who tracked mud across the rubber mats. She drove an old red sedan with a dented fender where she had backed into a snowbank three winters ago.
It took her twenty-two minutes to get there. I timed it by watching the sweep hand on the wall clock above the water cooler. The red hand ticked in jerky little jumps, six seconds to every inch of white plastic.
Maya came through the glass doors wearing her blue scrubs with little yellow paw prints stamped all over the pockets. Her hair was pulled back into a messy knot with a yellow pencil stuck right through the middle of it. She didn’t look at Miller. She didn’t look at Brenda. She walked straight across the room and put both her hands on my shoulders. Her palms were warm, smelling faintly of the disinfectant soap they used down at the clinic to scrub out the recovery runs.
“Grandma,” she said. Her voice wasn’t loud. It sounded like she had been running all the way from Elm Street. “What happened?”
“They won’t let me have it,” I told her. I opened my purse and showed her the pink form with my shaky handwriting. “They say I can’t see the letters.”
Miller cleared his throat. He handed Maya a small white slip of paper with a stamp on the back.
“She needs to go straight to the hospital,” Miller told my granddaughter. He didn’t look at me when he said it. He looked at the paw prints on Maya’s shoulder. “Urgent care or the emergency room. Right now. We had an officer check her reaction times in the back room while you were driving over. She didn’t even blink when the light flashed on the left side.”
Maya’s hands tightened on my coat. I could feel the bone in her thumbs pressing through the wool.
“Is this about your eyes again?” she asked me. Her eyes were wide, the same hazel color as her father’s before he took off for Denver and never sent another postcard.
“My eyes are just tired,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well on Sunday. The wind was rattling the shutters.”
“We’re going,” Maya said. She didn’t ask me if I wanted to drive my own car. She reached down and took my car keys right out of my handbag before I could close the clasp. “Come on, Grandma. Give me your arm.”
The waiting room at the county hospital smelled like boiled cabbage and floor bleach. We sat on orange plastic chairs bolted to a metal rail that ran the length of the hall. Every ten minutes, a nurse in green scrubs would walk out through double swinging doors, look at a clipboard, and call out a name that nobody in the room recognized.
We sat there for three hours. Maya didn’t read a magazine. She sat with her knees pressed together, her hands folded in her lap, staring at a poster on the wall that explained how to wash your hands to keep from getting the winter flu.
“You should go back to the clinic,” I told her around noon. “Dr. Evans will be mad if you leave the front desk empty for too long.”
“Dr. Evans is the one who told Miller to call me,” she said without turning her head.
The room went very quiet after that. A man across from us was coughing into a blue handkerchief, the dry, rattling cough of an old smoker who had spent forty years breathing coal dust down at the rail yards. Every time he coughed, his shoulders jerked forward like someone was hitting him between the shoulder blades with a leather strap.
When they finally called my name, it wasn’t a nurse who came out. It was a young man with dark curly hair escaping from beneath a blue surgical cap and a white coat that looked like it had come straight out of a plastic bag. His name tag said Dr. Vance.
He led us down a hallway that smelled colder than the waiting room. The walls were painted a pale green that looked like skimmed milk. We went into a small room no bigger than a pantry. There was a metal table with a paper roll across it and a computer monitor glowing in the corner with a picture of a grey walnut floating in a dark square.
“Clara,” the doctor said. He didn’t sit down. He stood by the monitor with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his white coat. “Your granddaughter tells me you’ve been having some trouble with your balance.”
“I missed a step on the porch,” I said. “And I clipped the door frame on the way out to get the mail on Saturday. It was dark. The bulb burned out.”
“And the car?” he asked.
“The state took my license,” I said, and for the first time all morning, my voice sounded like it belonged to an old woman. “They said I can’t see the letters.”
Dr. Vance didn’t talk about my eyes. He walked over to the computer screen and tapped the glass with the eraser end of a yellow pencil.
“Look at this right here,” he said.
I stood up from the metal chair and walked over to the desk. Maya stayed behind me, her hand resting lightly on the small of my back, right where my spine curved from thirty years of leaning over an ironing board in the back room of the dry cleaners.
On the screen was a picture of the inside of my head. It looked like a grey sponge cut right down the middle, with dark lines running through it like rivers on a county map. Near the back, right where the skull curved down toward the neck, there was a smudge. It wasn’t grey like the rest of the sponge. It was dark, almost black, shaped like a kidney bean with fuzzy edges.
“That’s a shadow,” I said.
“That’s not a shadow, Clara,” Dr. Vance said. His voice was very quiet, almost gentle, the way Arthur used to talk when he told me the corn crop was burnt out by the July heat before it even had a chance to silk. “That’s a mass about the size of a plum. It’s been growing there for a long time. At least a couple of years.”
The room didn’t tilt this time. It just got very small, like the walls were closing in until they were touching my shoulders. I could smell the starch on Maya’s blue scrubs, and I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the corner where they kept the sterile water bottles.
“Is that why I missed the step?” I asked.
“That’s why your left eye isn’t tracking,” Dr. Vance said. “That’s why you’ve been dropping things off the edge of the kitchen counter without realizing it. Your brain is trying to squeeze past something that shouldn’t be there.”
Maya didn’t cry. She leaned over my shoulder, her breath warm against my ear, and stared at the dark bean on the screen.
“Can they take it out?” she asked. Her voice was steady, but her fingers were digging into the wool of my coat so hard I could feel her nails through the lining.
Dr. Vance didn’t answer right away. He looked at the computer mouse, turning it over once in his palm before setting it back down on the grey mousepad.
“We need to run some more pictures,” he said. “MRI with contrast. Then we’ll talk to the surgeon in Grand Island. But I’m not going to lie to you, Clara. At seventy-nine, with this size and this location…”
He let the sentence drift off. He didn’t need to finish it. Everyone in Nebraska knows how those sentences end. They end with a beige room at the back of the house, a hospital bed brought in through the front door, and a stack of small white pill bottles on the nightstand next to the glass of water.
Maya didn’t let go of my back. She reached around and took my hand, her fingers cold against my knuckles.
“We’re going home, Grandma,” she said.
“My car is still at the DMV,” I told her.
“Let it stay there,” she said.
We walked out of the hospital through the sliding glass doors into the afternoon sun. The air smelled like wet asphalt and woodsmoke from the stoves over on the east side of town where the railroad workers lived. The $3,000 bill for the scan would come in the mail by Friday, addressed to Clara Miller in Martha’s careful handwriting because Martha still paid the town taxes from her kitchen table in Omaha.
Maya walked me to her red sedan and opened the passenger door. The seat was cold, and the plastic handle on the door was cracked right where she had taped it with grey duct tape two winters ago.
I climbed in and pulled my coat around my knees. Through the windshield, I watched two sparrows fighting over a crust of bread on the hood of a dusty pickup truck parked two spaces down.
“Did you call your mother?” I asked as Maya put the key into the ignition.
“Not yet,” she said. Her hands were on the steering wheel, her knuckles white against the black plastic. “I wanted to tell you first.”
The engine started with a dry, coughing rattle that shook the whole dashboard. Maya didn’t put it in gear right away. She sat there looking out through the dirty glass at the hospital sign swinging slightly in the autumn wind above the emergency room doors.
“Grandma?” she said softly.
“What is it, honey?”
“You didn’t clip the door frame on Saturday,” she said, her voice dropping so low I had to lean across the console to hear it over the heater fan. “It was three months ago. You did it the day after Dad’s birthday.”
I didn’t answer her. I looked down at my hands in my lap, the skin spotted with brown age spots like dried apple peel, and watched the red hand on the dashboard clock jump from one second to the next.
