What My Grandson Hid Under the Mattress
I have that paper in my Bible now, so I can give it to you exactly as he wrote it.
“Grandma,
There is no renovation.
This is your ice cream money. It is 86 dollars. I counted 3 times.
Dad says we cannot take anything from you. So I am giving it back.
We did not get ice cream. We got water cups. They are free. The lady put a cherry in Lucy’s sometimes.
Dad lost his job in April. We have to sell our house. I am not supposed to tell. Lucy does not know about the house. She thinks we are getting a new kitchen.
Please do not be mad at Dad. He is trying really hard.
I put my good stuff in my backpack in case we do not go back to my room.
Love, Ben
P.S. I liked the summer.”
I read it three times.
The first time I read it as a grandmother, and I had to put it down.
The second time I read it as a mother, and I got angry in a way I had not been angry since Ray was alive.
The third time I read only one line, the fourth one. “Dad says we cannot take anything from you.”
I knew that sentence. I knew where my son had learned it, and who had taught it to him, and who had sat at the same table and passed the potatoes while he learned it.
I went downstairs and picked up the kitchen phone.
I had the first six numbers dialed before I stopped.
What would I say? And what would he say back? He would say, “We’re fine, Mom.” He would say, “Ben’s got an imagination.” He would say, “I have to go,” and then there would be a dial tone, and I would be standing in a kitchen in Ohio holding a dead receiver.
A phone call was something Todd could end.
I hung up. I put the note and the money back in the envelope and put the envelope in my purse. I changed out of my barn shoes. I took Ray’s truck keys off the nail by the door, because my car had a soft tire and his old Ford had a full tank.
Then I stopped and went back and got the cooler. I put the chickens in it for the second time that morning.
It was a quarter till ten when I turned west on the county road.
It is four hours from my lane to my son’s driveway if you keep to the speed limit, and I keep to the speed limit.
Up through Mansfield, then Route 30 west the whole way. Bucyrus. Upper Sandusky. Van Wert, where the land goes so flat you can watch a grain elevator for ten minutes before you reach it. Then the Indiana line and the big green sign.
I did not turn the radio on.
I thought about a truck. Not the one I was driving.
When Todd was twenty-two he needed four thousand dollars for a used pickup so he could take a job in Fort Wayne. He asked his father. Ray gave it to him. Ray was a good man in more ways than I could list for you, a deacon, a man who plowed the neighbors out every winter and never took gas money.
But Ray could not give a thing without keeping a string on it.
That Thanksgiving, with the whole family at the table, Ray said, “Pass the gravy down to the fella with my truck.”