What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress
My son set the cooler back on my porch like it was something that had been delivered to the wrong house.
“We don’t need anything from you, Mom.”
He did not say it mean. That was the part that got under my ribs. He said it the way a man at a counter says he does not need a bag.
I had packed that cooler at five in the morning. Two frozen chickens from the Amish place on the county road. A dozen brown eggs. Fourteen ears of sweet corn I had picked the evening before with Lucy holding the bucket. Four jars of green beans. A sack of tomatoes still warm from the vine. I had figured it would save them a week of groceries, and I had figured it without knowing why the figuring mattered so much to me.
“Todd, it’s just corn,” I said. “It’ll go to waste. I can’t eat fourteen ears.”
“Then give it to Jeff.” He looked past me at the barn. “We’ve got stores in Indiana.”
Then he reached into his own shirt pocket, where I had tucked a folded fifty dollar bill while I was hugging him, and he took it out between two fingers. He did not hand it back to me. He set it on the porch rail and put the egg carton on top of it so the wind would not take it.
“For school shoes,” I said. “Ben’s are split at the toe.”
“I know what my son’s shoes look like.”
Missy was already in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap. She was looking at the dashboard. She had lost weight since June. I had noticed it when she got out to hug the kids and I had thought, well, a summer of eating out of a microwave while the kitchen is torn up will do that.
Lucy was buckled in behind her mother, seven years old, waving at me with both hands like I was a parade.
Ben was behind his father’s seat. He was nine. He had his small green backpack on his knees with both arms around it, the way he had held it since the first day of June.
He was not looking at me. He was looking up at the second window from the left, the guest room, where he and his sister had slept for ten weeks.
I thought he was just sad to go.
Todd got in. The truck went down my lane at nine o’clock that Saturday morning and turned west on the county road. Lucy waved until the corn hid her.
Ben never waved at all.
I stood on the porch with a cooler, a fifty dollar bill under a carton of eggs, and a feeling I could not name yet. I am sixty-six years old. I have buried a husband and a mother and one very good dog. I know what grief feels like and it was not that.
It felt like I had been told something and had not heard it.
I should say how the summer came about.
Todd called me the second week of May. That alone was unusual. My son calls on Sunday nights for eleven minutes, and this was a Wednesday.
“Mom, I need to ask you something, and you can say no.”
“Well, ask it.”
“We’re redoing the house. The kitchen, mostly, and they have to pull up the floors clear through the hallway. It’s going to be a mess. Dust and nails and no stove. Missy and I were thinking the kids could come to you for the summer.”