The Day I Trusted My Granddaughter’s Fear
The Phone Call
I answered on the fourth ring, mostly because Heather tugged on my sleeve and told me to, in the practical way children have of cutting through adult hesitation.
“Mama,” Marty said, before I’d even gotten a full hello out. His voice had a wire in it I hadn’t heard since he was twenty-two and calling to tell me his truck had gone off the road in an ice storm. “Is Heather with you? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “We’re both fine. Marty, what is going on with your car?”
There was a long pause on the other end, long enough that I heard him exhale slowly, the way a man does when he has been carrying something heavy long enough that setting it down feels almost as hard as picking it up did.
“I need to tell you something,” he said. “And I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything, because it’s going to sound worse for about two minutes than it actually is.”
I sat down on the porch step. Lane sat beside me. Heather climbed into my lap, which she has not done regularly since she was five, and I let her, because some nights a person of any age needs to be held while the truth arrives.
“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“It’s Pamela,” he said.
What Marty Had Been Carrying
My daughter Pamela is twenty-eight. She is the baby of our family, born four years after Marty, and she married a good man named Lamar who drives long-haul freight for a trucking outfit out of Chattanooga, gone Sunday night to Friday most weeks, home just long enough on the weekends to remember what his own bed feels like. Pamela and Lamar live twenty minutes from us, in a little rented house with a porch swing they’ve been meaning to finish hanging for two years, and this past winter, after five years of trying and two losses neither of them talked about much, Pamela finally got the news she had been praying for.
She was pregnant. Fourteen weeks along by the time any of this happened, and terrified in a way I understood better than she knew, because the two of us had never once sat down and talked honestly about the baby Lane and I lost between Marty and Pamela, thirty years ago, a little girl we had already started calling Constance before we ever got the chance to bring her home.
Marty told me, sitting there on the phone with his voice cracking in places he tried to smooth over, that Pamela had started spotting around week ten. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that sent her to the emergency room in the middle of the night. But enough that her doctor at Erlanger wanted her seen every week instead of every month, enough that there had been talk of a shortened cervix and the word “monitoring” repeated so many times it had started to feel like its own kind of threat.