The Card on the Porch Rail

I closed my eyes there in the dark.

“Grandma, the Hendersons were there. Our neighbors. Dad’s boss was there. Mom’s hairdresser was there.”

“I heard a nice crowd.”

“So I held up the card. I held it open so they could both see the inside. And I asked them one thing.”

“What did you ask them?”

She was quiet. I could hear a ceiling fan going wherever she was.

“I asked them, if she isn’t immediate family, then who is this that’s been writing to me for eighteen years?”

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth.

“And nobody said anything,” Paige said. “Mom started to and stopped. Dad just looked at the floor. He looked at the floor, Grandma. So I came upstairs.”

“Your mother worked hard on that party.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m only saying.”

“Please don’t stick up for them tonight. You can do it tomorrow.”

I had to smile at that, in spite of everything. She gets that mouth from Dale.

“What time do you get up?” she asked.

“I’m old. I get up at five whether I like it or not.”

“Don’t leave. Promise me. Don’t check out, don’t get on the road. What’s near you? You said a Waffle House?”

“Right across the lot.”

“Six o’clock,” she said. “Be in the Waffle House at six o’clock. Promise.”

“Paige, you don’t need to be driving around at that hour.”

“Promise me, Gammy Kath.”

She had not called me that since she was three years old.

“I promise,” I said.

I did not sleep much. I lay there listening to the ice machine and the trucks gearing down on the interstate, and around four I gave up and went out to the Buick in my slippers and got the blue dress.

I put it on. I did my hair as well as a motel mirror allows. I put the check in my purse, in the zipper pocket, and I checked the zipper twice.

At twenty to six I walked across the parking lot. The sky was just going gray at the edges and the weeds in the strip were wet on my ankles.

There were two truckers at the counter and a man in a reflective vest asleep sitting up. The grill was going. The whole place smelled like coffee and bacon grease and syrup.

The waitress had a name tag that said Brenda.

“Anywhere you like, hon.”

I took the big booth in the corner by the window. The table was sticky. They are always sticky. I put my purse beside me on the seat and both hands around a mug of coffee and I watched the lot.

At three minutes to six a little silver car turned in off the frontage road, going too fast, and parked crooked across two spaces.

The driver’s door opened.

My granddaughter got out of that car in her graduation gown.

It was dark green, the school color, and it was wrinkled from being worn all the day before, and she had the cap on, pinned to her hair, with the gold tassel swinging. She had on tennis shoes underneath. She stood there in the gray light and looked at the windows of the Waffle House until she found me.

Then the other doors opened.

Four more of them climbed out. Two girls and two boys, every one of them in a green gown, one boy still trying to get his cap to stay on. They looked like they had slept about as much as I had.