What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress

“The whole summer?”

“If it’s too much, say so.”

It was not too much. I live in a white farmhouse outside Mount Vernon, Ohio, with four bedrooms and one person in it. Since Ray passed I had been eating my supper standing up at the sink because setting one place at that long table felt worse than setting none.

“Bring them the day school lets out,” I said.

“I’ll pay you for their food.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

There was a quiet on the line that I took for a bad connection.

“We’ll see,” he said.

They came the first Saturday of June. Lucy ran straight to the barn to find the cats. Ben stood in my kitchen with that green backpack on both shoulders and looked the room over slowly, the table, the pie safe, the calendar from the feed store, like a boy memorizing a place.

“You can set your bag down, honey,” I said.

“I’m okay.”

“What have you got in there, gold bars?”

“It’s just my stuff, Grandma.”

He wore it to supper. He wore it to the barn. That first night I went up to check on them and found him asleep on his side with one strap looped around his wrist.

I did not think much of it. Boys that age have treasures. His father at nine kept a coffee can of arrowheads and washers under his bed and would have fought a bear for it.

It was a good summer. I want that understood, because of what I learned later. Nobody was pretending about that part.

Lucy learned to gather eggs without shrieking. Ben learned to drive the lawn tractor in first gear and mowed the same strip by the mailbox four times because he liked the turn at the end. We shelled peas on the porch. We went to Vacation Bible School at my church, where Lucy made a sheep out of cotton balls and Ben got asked to carry the flag because he was the only boy who could stand still.

And twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, I drove them into town.

There is a dairy bar on Coshocton Avenue with a walk-up window and two picnic benches under a striped awning. It sits right across the road from the feed store. Every trip, I would pull into the feed store lot, take four dollar bills out of my purse, and put them in Ben’s hand.

“Two apiece. Hold your sister’s hand crossing.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then I would go in for layer mash or fly spray or twenty minutes of talk, and when I came back out they would be sitting on the bench under the awning, swinging their feet.

“Did you get your cones?”

“We ate them fast,” Ben would say.

“What kind?”

“Twist.”

“Both of you?”

“Lucy got sprinkles.”

I remember thinking, once, in July, that I never saw a napkin. Never a drip on a shirt, never a sticky chin on a seven-year-old, and I have raised a child and know what a cone does to one in an Ohio summer.

I noticed it. I let it go. A woman can notice a thing and fold it up small and put it in a drawer because the drawer is easier than the question.

There were other things in that drawer.

Ben’s shoes, split at the toe. I took him to the shoe store on the square in late June and he would not try on a single pair. “These are fine, Grandma. I like these.”