“Wow,” I said. That wasn’t the most brilliant thing to say, so I added, “That’s amazing.” That still didn’t seem very brilliant, so I came up with, “I mean, it’s really cool. Einstein.” That was the best I could do for now.
“Robbie doesn’t like it because I never forget a thing,” Mrs. Parker said with a laugh. “Isn’t that true, hon?” She looked at him with what could only be called overwhelming love.
“It makes you hard to argue with,” he said. But he smiled, and she smiled. I could probably count on two hands the times Obaachan and I had smiled at each other, and those times only happened when we were watching her favorite TV show,
Mrs. Parker and Robbie walked off together to the combine she was driving. Mr. Laskey headed toward his house. There was nobody left to tell us where a grocery store might be.
CHAPTER SIX
After I went to the bathroom and Obaachan’s aspirin kicked in, she, Jaz, Thunder, and I got back into the pickup. Obaachan made a slow, wide U-turn, and once again we were bumping along the dirt road. “Which way should we head?” I asked. “I didn’t see a store on the highway.”
“Errrr.”
If I’d been with my parents, I knew I wouldn’t have to participate in finding a store. They would take care of it. But with Obaachan, who could say what would happen? Then out of nowhere the thought popped into my head:
“Is there map in glove compartment?” Obaachan asked. Jaz began going through the glove compartment. He turned over each slip of paper and read it for a moment, as if that were the only way to determine if it was a map.
“Just a map of the whole country,” he finally said.
Obaachan drove to the highway and kept going until we got to a gas station. Then she pulled up and turned to me. “Go ask where grocery store is, Miss Talk So Good.”
I got out and walked into the station. There were a few candy bars and drinks for sale, but there was no mini-mart like in many gas stations. The attendant was sitting on a stool behind the counter. “Hi,” I said.
“Hello, young lady.”
“Can you tell me where the closest grocery store is?”
“What are you looking for?”
I paused. “A grocery store,” I repeated.
“I mean, what do you need to buy?”
“Bread, canned chicken, lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise.”
“Sounds like you want to make a sandwich.” He lazily spun his stool around until he was facing me again.
“Yes, sandwiches.”
The man asked, “Do you need any drinks to go with those sandwiches?”
“Yes, drinks.”
He gestured grandly to where the drinks were in a small refrigerator.
I hesitated before turning and walking out and up to the driver’s-seat window. “He wants to know if I need to buy any drinks. They have Coke and stuff.”
“He tell you where grocery store is?” Obaachan asked.
“No, I think he wants me to buy drinks.”
“How much drinks cost in there?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Obaachan looked worried. “What if drinks here too expensive and we no have enough money for food? Get in seat.” She restarted the engine as I got in.
We drove to a small restaurant, but it was closed, maybe forever. It wasn’t boarded up, but it just had that aura of something that was closed forever. Farther down the highway, more glass windows in what used to be stores were boarded up. I remembered learning in school that some small towns in the Great Plains were closing up as children grew older and moved to the cities.
We drove all the way to the grain elevator about ten miles away.
“I go this time,” Obaachan said. She got out and was gone for what seemed like hours. I started timing her after a while. Thirty minutes passed. The sweat dripped down my forehead, getting DEET into my eyes. They instantly started tearing up, the sting was so bad.
“I think you should go in,” Jaz finally said.
“No, here she comes.”
Obaachan got into the truck with a paper in her hand.
“What took you so long?” I asked.
“We talk about wheat and Japanese woman his second cousin marry.” She started the engine.
“What does she have to do with wheat?”
“Nothing. He want to talk about it after he see me. I talk to him because he give good direction.” She pulled onto the highway again. “Big store in next town, but smaller one nearby. Keep eye open for Carver Avenue.”
We drove about a mile before we spotted Carver. Obaachan turned right, and we drove and drove and drove until she finally pulled over. She handed me the directions. “Read this. What I do wrong?”
I looked at the lines scrawled on the paper. “We were supposed to turn left on Carver.”
“He tell me right and draw left on map. I may not have photograph memory, but I know I right about this.”
When we finally reached the store, more than an hour had passed since we’d left the Laskey place. I had a sinking feeling that this was probably what the whole summer would be like as we searched for groceries in each new town, with me, Miss Talk So Good, asking clerk after clerk where the grocery store was. But it didn’t bother me so much. I knew we were here to save the mortgage.
By the time we got back to the farm, it was close to two thirty. Obaachan’s back was killing her. Still, she laid out a plastic cloth we’d bought with our own money and made the sandwiches on that. Obaachan was a perfectionist. Her sandwiches were works of art. She cut them into perfectly symmetrical triangles and always added a slice of onion so thin, you hardly knew it was there. And the meat was always in just the right place. You’d never take a bite and get too much bread and not enough meat. Then she’d use parsley to make it fancy, except she tore off parts of the parsley so that it looked more like a little flourish. I’d actually helped her write an article about sandwich making. She sent the article to a local paper, and when they didn’t publish it, she canceled our subscription.
The crew was probably starving to death. “You tell Mrs. Parker I finish. Don’t say ‘we’ finish,” she told me.
I climbed into the pickup and pressed the button on the radio. Mrs. Parker was still out driving one of the combines. “My grandmother is finished making the sandwiches,” I told her. “She’ll be right there.”
Obaachan had climbed into the driver’s seat with the sandwiches.
“What on Earth took so long?” Mrs. Parker asked.
“We had to find the store,” I said politely.
There was no answer at first, and then she said, “All right.” She clicked off, then clicked on again. “I forgot to tell you about the timetable. Starting tomorrow, we need breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, and dinner at seven. Why did it take so long to find a store?”
“We were unfamiliar with the area,” I answered.
“Couldn’t you ask someone?”
Obaachan yanked the microphone out of my hand and said, “Man at elevator where we get direction have to
