Free My Brother Louis Measures Worms by Barbara Robinson

Rhoda needed.
    â€œIsn’t that a long way to go? I don’t think all this travel is good for you; you look tired to me. Why not stay home and rest?” Aunt Rhoda would say, thinking that was just what Mother needed.
    As a matter of fact, Mother thought it was a long way to go, too. She loved the flower shows and the sociability and the tea and cookies, but she didn’t love getting there.
    My father had again provided her with a car—for his own peace of mind, he said, lest in some emergency she find herself crashing through traffic with Aunt Mildred—but Mother still had little confidence in her driving skills, and no sense of direction at all, and continued to avoid any expedition which required her to drive very far or to figure out where she was going.
    Still, when elected a judge by her garden club, Mother must have decided that the pleasure involved outweighed the perils. Once or twice a week, at the height of the flower show season, she would set out, clutching maps and instructions on how to get to the appointed place in Circleville or Athens or Wilmington, but even so, she was either lost or late most of the time until she stumbled on a way out of this continual dilemma.
    While she was traveling down the highway one morning on her way to a distant flower show, a sudden gust of wind blew her vital information out the window, leaving her stranded; because, as she said, “If I get lost with a map in my hand, I would certainly get lost without one.”
    At that moment she noticed a station wagon ahead of her on the road—loaded with green growing plants, driven by a lady in what looked like a pretty hat; and, having nothing to lose, she simply followed this car on the reasonable assumption that it was going to a flower show.
    â€œAnd not only was it going to the show,” she added triumphantly, “but that lady won first prize for her tuberous begonia. It wasn’t a hat after all, it was a tuberous begonia.”
    Thereafter Mother spent less time studying her maps (which didn’t seem to help much anyway) and more time studying the traffic around her, with surprising success. Time after time she was able to locate, identify and pursue some member of the local flower show crowd . . . and thus arrive at the right place, on time and unruffled. Sometimes the clues were obvious: many plants, ladies holding dried arrangements; sometimes more subtle: a horticultural society emblem in the window, a bumper sticker reading I Grow Gladiolas.
    Of course, my father had no idea that this was going on. He knew that Mother liked flowers and was a judge of them, but he had no interest in such activities. If she enjoyed doing it, whatever it was, he was happy for her, and that was that . . . and Mother, knowing this, chose not to bore him with details.
    He was very much surprised, therefore, while having lunch with a customer in a town some forty miles from home, to look up and see Mother in conversation with the cashier of the restaurant—getting change for a dollar, as it happened, so she could use the phone in what was an emergency situation.
    She had followed a car absolutely loaded with flowers and greenery all the way to its destination, which turned out to be a funeral home. She was not only distressed but somewhat indignant, because the driver of the car, a florist, had not used his delivery truck, in which case she would not have followed him in the first place.
    My father excused himself to his customer and went to see what this was all about. Had anyone asked him that day about Mother’s whereabouts he would probably have said, “Oh, Grace is at home—not much of a gadabout, you know,” for so he believed.
    â€œWell, this is a surprise,” he said, and kissed her. “What are you doing in Fredonia?”
    In Mother’s reply lay the crux of the whole ensuing tangle . . . for what was she to say? That she had, by mistake, followed a car full of plants