The squeak started in September.
My mother called me on a Sunday night to tell me about it. She calls every Sunday at seven. She has since I left for college thirty-one years ago. You could set a clock by her.
“It’s the Buick,” she said. “There’s a little squeak when I brake. Front end. Left side, I think.”
“How bad?”
“Not bad. Just a squeak. Like a mouse.”
“Mom, you should get it looked at.”
“I’m going to. Ray’s place, in town. Next week.” She paused. “But my knee’s acting up again. I don’t love driving on it right now. The clutch on the—” She stopped. “The brake. Pushing the brake. It hurts.”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. “I’ll come down Thursday.”
“You don’t have to do that, Beth.”
“I want to.”
That was true. But it was also true that I worried about her. More every year. She was seventy-four. She lived alone in the house I grew up in, a white farmhouse on eleven acres outside Harlan Falls, Pennsylvania. Sixty miles from the nearest hospital. Sixty miles from me. My father had been gone four years. Her knee was bad. Her eyes weren’t great at night. And her car was a 2009 Buick LaCrosse with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it.
Every time the phone rang at a strange hour, my stomach dropped.
So I drove down Thursday morning. Two and a half hours from Pittsburgh. She was waiting on the porch in her gray cardigan with her purse on her lap, like she’d been sitting there since dawn. She probably had.
“You didn’t have to come,” she said, climbing into my passenger seat with a small grunt of pain.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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