The Real Reason Behind Grandma’s Question

Two years of six hundred fifty dollars

I want to explain what that number meant before I explain what it did to the room, because the number itself was not a small thing for my grandmother to say out loud.

Ramona does not have money the way people mean when they say that. She has a modest widow’s pension, a garden, four grown children who each think one of the others is handling her finances, and a habit of setting a little aside every month the way she has done since she was nineteen years old. When Wesley and I married, she took me aside at the reception, out by the food truck they had parked behind the grange hall, and she told me she intended to wire us six hundred fifty dollars on the first of every month for as long as she was able, no questions asked, no accounting required, because she remembered exactly how hard the first years of a marriage can lean on two people who are trying to build something out of almost nothing.

She had asked for one small thing in return. She wanted it to go to Wesley’s account, because he was the one who paid our bills and she did not want to complicate two young people’s marriage by routing money through a wife’s account instead of a husband’s, an old fashioned instinct from an old fashioned woman, and at the time neither of us thought twice about it.

I want to be honest about what our life actually looked like for those two years, because it is the part of this story I am least proud of and the part that matters most.

Wesley works as a diesel mechanic at the farm equipment dealership out on Route 322, the kind of job where you come home smelling like grease no matter how long you scrub, and it pays fairly, not generously. I picked up overnight stocking and register shifts at the pharmacy in town three, sometimes four nights a week, because Wesley kept telling me the truck needed work, or the dealership had cut his hours, or we needed to be careful until things settled. I told myself frugal was a personality trait I had simply grown into. I wore the same coat three winters running and told myself it still had good years left in it. I bought the store brand formula before I even had a baby to feed, just in case, because that is the kind of thing you start doing when somebody you trust keeps telling you money is tight.