The Landlord Who Made Me His Cook

I did not call her to be rescued. I want that on the record. I called her because her hip surgery was coming up and I was supposed to help, and we got to talking, and she asked how I was, and Ruth Hollis has a way of asking how you are that is less a question than a door opening. And I was so tired, and it was so dark in that driveway, and the whole story came out of me in one long shaking mess. The pork roast. The lists. The key. The cash passed hand to hand. The roof that always needed doing.

My grandmother was quiet for a long time. Ruth is a quiet woman. People mistake it for softness and that is the last mistake they make.

Then she said, “Dana, honey. I’m going to come stay with you a while after my surgery. Doctor won’t let me be alone anyhow. I’ll come to you.”

I started to say she did not have to, that she should recover at her own place where everything was set up right, and she cut me off, gentle but final.

“I want to meet this man,” she said. “And I want to eat some of your cooking. Those two things.”

Three weeks later I drove to Columbus and brought my grandmother home from the surgery center with a walker in the trunk and a bag of pill bottles rattling in her lap. She was seventy-nine. She was five foot nothing and getting shorter. And when she settled into the recliner in my little front room and looked around and said “well, isn’t this nice,” I felt something unclench in my chest that had been clenched since June.

She watched for a week. That is the thing about my grandmother. She does not come in swinging. She comes in watching.

She watched me get up at five-thirty to prep a breakfast casserole to take up the hill before my Dollar General open. She watched me come home at three and turn right back around to go cook their supper and do their laundry and bathe their boy. She watched Gerald’s truck pull into my driveway one evening, watched him stand on my porch and hand me a list and a stack of cash, watched me hand the cash back. She did not say a word. She sat in the recliner with her mending in her lap and her reading glasses down her nose and she watched it all with those pale quiet eyes, and I felt the shame of it twice over, once for living it and once for her seeing it.

On the seventh night she finally spoke.

“Tell me about his mother,” she said.

I did not understand the question. “Whose mother?”

“The landlord. Vance. You said his mother comes Sundays. What’s her name.”

“Pauline,” I said. “Pauline Vance. She’s older, she lives over toward Chesterville. Why?”

My grandmother took her glasses off and folded them, which is a thing she does when she has arrived somewhere in her head.