The Account My Grandfather Asked About
My Grandfather
My grandfather is not a man given to big gestures. He wore the same brown canvas coat every winter of my childhood until the elbows wore through and my grandmother, before she passed, finally hid it and bought him a new one without asking. He tips exact change at the diner on the county road and has for as long as anyone can remember. He does not raise his voice, does not repeat himself more than twice, and has never once, in the entire span of my life, asked anyone at that table for anything.
He grew up with less than my mother ever let on that we had, and he has talked about it only a handful of times, always in the same flat tone he uses for weather reports. His own father lost the family’s small piece of ground during a bad stretch when my grandfather was young, and he finished school two years behind because of it, working feed store hours before sunrise so there would be something on the table at night. He never went past that. He built a life instead, forty one years at the co op, a paid off house, a truck he keeps running past all sense, and a habit of quietly making sure nobody in his family ever had to live the particular kind of thin he grew up living.
The year I was born, he opened an account at the credit union in my name. Not a fortune. He would tell you himself it was never meant to be a fortune. Seventy five dollars a month, sometimes more in a good year for cattle prices, deposited without fanfare on the first of the month for eighteen years straight. He told my parents what it was for in plain words, the same words he used at that dinner table twenty six years later: so she has a chance at school that I never had.
He trusted my parents to tell me when I turned eighteen. That was the whole arrangement. No lawyer drew it up. No paperwork bound anyone to anything beyond his own word and theirs. In a town where everyone’s business ends up at the feed store counter by Tuesday, a handshake still means something, or it is supposed to.
The Years Money Was Tight
I want to walk through a few of the years directly, because I have spent the better part of a month now turning each one over like a stone, looking at the underside I never bothered to check before.
I was sixteen the year of the class trip to the state capitol. Forty two dollars. My mother sat across from me at the kitchen table, plainly upset, or so I believed at the time, and said there was nothing left in the budget that month. I stayed home and watched my friends’ photos come back from that trip for years afterward, feeling the particular, specific loneliness of being the one kid who couldn’t go.
I was eighteen the year I applied to the state university two hours north and got in, and I remember my mother’s face when I brought her the acceptance letter and the financial aid packet side by side. She did not look happy. She looked frightened, in a way I read at the time as worry about how we would ever make it work, and read now as something closer to panic about a math problem she already knew the true answer to.