I was on my knees in the garden when the call came, pulling bindweed out from around the piquillo peppers my late husband Xabier taught me to grow the summer we got married, and for the rest of my life I will remember that my hands were dirty when I answered, because I never got the chance to wash them before I was driving.
My name is Miren Marchetti. I am sixty-eight years old, a retired third-grade teacher, a widow going on six years now, and I have lived in Wheeler Bend, Idaho my whole adult life, in the kind of county where everybody still waves two fingers off the steering wheel at every truck they pass, whether they know the driver or not. Xabier’s grandfather came over from the Basque Country to herd sheep in these hills before there was a paved road within twenty miles of here, and there is still a framed photograph of him and his dog in my hallway, both of them squinting into weather that hasn’t blown through in eighty years. I tell you this because it matters. Because the woman who left my grandson alone in an airport terminal likes to say I am dramatic, that I make everything bigger than it is, and I want you to understand exactly what kind of woman is telling you that story before you decide whether to believe her.
The number on my phone that morning had a Boise area code and eight extra digits, the kind of number that comes off an airport payphone, the kind of number nobody under forty even knows still exists. I almost didn’t answer it. I am glad every day of my life that I did.
“Grandma?”
The voice was so small I thought for a second it was a wrong number, some other woman’s grandbaby dialing digits at random. Then I heard him breathe, that particular shaking pull of air a child takes in right before he starts to cry and is trying with everything he has not to.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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