Elvis Takes a Back Seat by Leanna Ellis Page A

gift-wrapped box, “is for the third anniversary. So says Hallmark.”
    â€œDid you give me a belt?”
    â€œA whip,” he’d joked.
    The watch helped keep me on track, so I wasn’t as late as was my tendency. Almost twenty years married to Stu and now I laugh at how I like to stay on schedule, rarely running late. But today, because of Ivy, we’re more than an hour behind the schedule I’d planned.
    â€œHow far are we from Memphis?” Rae asks, cutting off my memory.
    â€œOnly a few more hours, depending on”—I feel Elvis staring at me from the parking lot, like Stu used to wait for me, already in the car, motor going, clock ticking—“how many more stops.” To divert Rae from her concerns for Ivy, I say, “How long has it been since you’ve been to Memphis?”
    â€œA few years. Twenty.” She pauses as if she’s just now added up the years and realized how long it’s actually been. “Forty maybe.”
    A family with four young children is shown to a nearby table. The disheveled mother jiggles a baby against her shoulder. The father takes another off toward the restroom. The wait staff brings booster seats and high chairs.
    â€œThink Memphis has changed?”
    Rae twists the straw sticking out of her water glass. “That’s the one certainty in life—change.”
    â€œAre you excited about going back now?”
    She takes a long sip of water. “Not really. I don’t like to visit old haunts.”
    Walking down memory lane for me these days often includes puddles of tears. But I don’t sense heartache in Rae. She seems strong, as if she can simply block out memories she doesn’t care to reexamine. Hoping to fill up the emptiness between us, I ask, “Why’d you leave?”
    â€œIt was time. Time for new adventures.”
    I wonder how she knew it was time. Or was it simply an offhand comment in retrospect? In the past year I’ve tried on new lifestyles in my mind, imagining myself becoming a hermit in the mountains with the solitude of earth and sky for company, or traveling abroad and letting the crowds of tourists press memories out of my mind. But I’m frozen with uncertainty.
    Rae once told me, “God will reveal his plan. In his time.”
    But frankly, I’ve heard nothing. I doubt my ability to hear God’s voice. And if Stu’s dying was God’s plan, then I’m not sure I want what he has planned for me. So the question for me is, what do I want?
    Others pushed me into a garage sale. Stu pushed me into this trip. I don’t know which direction I’d push me.
    â€œI came here …” Rae waves her hand, her charm bracelet jangling, as if to erase that remark. “I came to Dallas for a while and stayed with your mother.”
    â€œWhen I was a baby,” I said, remembering the pictures in my mother’s photo albums. “Then you went to the west coast?”
    She hesitates as if uncertain of her response, then nods. “I worked my way there by way of Chicago, New York, Santa Fe, and L.A. Then I eventually landed in Oregon. I came back to Dallas once more. You were a girl, maybe three or so. Do you remember?”
    â€œVaguely.”
    â€œNo, you were four.”
    I remember lying in my bed, my pink-checked pajamas tickling my chin. Aunt Rae came in to say good night andgood-bye. She’d be leaving early the next morning. I clutched the little doll she’d given me, which I’d named Emily.
    She told me a bedtime story of a little girl who went to Topsy-Turvyville. “Everything is upside down and backwards. Cars go backwards. Elevators go sideways, too. Houses have their chimneys on the ground, their front doors way up high. People even eat upside down.”
    â€œI bet that’s messy,” I remember saying as I giggled.
    â€œSometimes,” she chuckled. “But the people who live there are used to it, so