The Door My Son Pointed Me To
“Hi, Grandma,” she said, very quietly.
“Hi, sweet pea. Roll?”
She nodded. I gave her the biggest one in the pan. She took her tray and walked to her table, and she looked back at me twice on the way. Both times her forehead was puckered up, like she was working a long division problem.
Nathan came by my house that night at half past six. He did not knock. He had a key to my door the same as I had one to his, and he used it and walked straight through to my kitchen in his work shirt with the implement dealership’s name over the pocket.
“All right,” he said. “You made your point.”
“I wasn’t making a point. I went to work.”
“I was forty minutes late opening the counter. In harvest. Jeff had to cover for me, and he made sure I knew it. Brittany burned a personal day.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“So tomorrow. Six.”
“Tomorrow I’m at the school at a quarter to six.”
“Mom. This is over one sentence.”
“It isn’t one sentence, Nathan. It’s four years, with one sentence set on top.”
He put his hands on the back of one of my kitchen chairs. They were Ray’s hands, wide across the knuckle. “You are really going to do this to your grandkids.”
“I’m going to see two of them every day at twenty past eleven and ten till noon. I saw them today. Jack about lifted off the floor.”
“And Molly?”
That one landed where he meant it to. I thought about her fist in my sleeve. I made myself wait a second before I answered, so that my voice would come out level.
“Molly has a mother and a father,” I said.
He straightened up. “Fine. We’ll figure it out. People do it every day.”
“They do,” I said. “Mostly they pay for it.”
He left by the front door and he did not close it gently. I sat a long while afterward with my hands flat on the table. I will tell you the truth. I very nearly called him back. Not because he was right. Because of the sleeve.
Brittany called on Wednesday night. I was on the porch with a blanket over my knees, watching the grain trucks go by on the county road with their lights on.
She did not say hello. She said, “I’ve called seven places.”
“All right.”
“Little Sprouts on Second Avenue has room. For all three. Molly all day, and Ava and Jack before and after school.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s twenty-three hundred and forty dollars a month, Gail.”
I did not say anything.
“That is more than our house payment. That is more than the house payment and my car put together.”
“I know what it is.”
“Did you know it was that much?”
“I had a fair idea. It was eighteen hundred four years ago, for two. You sat at my table and cried about it.”
It was quiet long enough that I could hear her kitchen clock. I knew that clock. I had changed the battery in it.
“So what is it you want?” she said finally, and her voice had gotten careful. “Is it money? Because if you had told us this was about money, we could have had a conversation.”
“I asked for Fridays, Brittany. That is what I told you it was about.”
“Nathan didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Then he ought not to have said it so calmly.”