Every Halloween she took the egg money and boarded a Greyhound for Arizona.
She'd been doing it since her last kid was eight.
``You can take care of yourselves,'' she said, and she was right.
No one believed she lived on the egg money. It probably didn't amount to seventy dollars. People thought there was a rich old man in Scottsdale or Tucson. Her husband Dwight said she worked as an aide to a paraplegic in Phoenix. She didn't write.
She came back each year in time to get a May basket from a neighborhood child. To be fair she worked hard when she returned, scrubbing the house and cleaning and mending and putting away winter clothes. She put in a big garden and canned and froze a year's supply and made a couple of quilts.
One year when the kids were grown Dwight took a couple of weeks' vacation and followed the bus in his old Ford. When she got off in Phoenix he walked up to her.
``I thought that was you following. You want to come with me?'' she asked.
``Sure, for a while,'' he said.
They started walking. They kept on walking. They drank gas station water, they ate almost nothing.
``Where we going?''
``Nowhere. Something will happen.'' They kept on walking.
At some shiny new retirement town she got a job at a Tastee Freez and a part time job at WalMart.
``This is where I'll be,'' she said. ``I know what they say. Well there ain't no rich old man. But let them think that if it makes them happy.
I just can't take the cold. That's why I leave. I just can't take the cold.''
He looked around at the grey and heat flattened desert, the sterile new buildings set in emerald, water sucking grass. The dreadful emptiness. He kissed her once and then again and set off up the road to Phoenix and his car.