The Envelope He Took Back Off the Mantel
I did not answer right away.
“I didn’t want to cost you your mother,” I said.
“You didn’t cost me anything. She did.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Sarah, he nodded. Did you see him? She said that and Ben nodded, like it made sense to him. Like he’d been waiting to hear it.”
“I saw.”
“What about the taxes?” I said. “February’s going to come whether she’s sorry or not.”
Paul was quiet a minute. “I don’t know. I’m not going to let them lose the house. But I’m not going to set money on that mantel like nothing happened. I can’t pay to keep a roof over a room my kids aren’t welcome in.”
He put the check back in the envelope and put the envelope on top of the refrigerator, where we keep the things we have not decided about.
“She gets a chance,” I said. “I mean it, Paul. I’m not asking you to cut her off. I’m asking that they never hear that twice.”
“They won’t,” he said.
Roy’s truck pulled into our driveway at a quarter past nine the next morning.
I was at the kitchen window in my robe. He has a gray Chevy pickup, twenty years old, that he keeps cleaner than most people keep their dishes. I watched him shut it off and then just sit, with both hands on the wheel, for what must have been two full minutes.
Then he got out. He was by himself. He had on his good sport coat under his barn jacket, the same one from the courthouse.
Paul opened the door before he could knock.
“Dad.”
“Son.” Roy took his cap off. He is seventy-five and he has never been a talker. In all the years I had known him I do not think I had heard him say thirty words in a row. “I’d like to come in, if I’m welcome. I’ve got something to say, and I’d like the kids to hear it. If their mother will allow it.”
He looked at me when he said that. Not at Paul.
“You’re welcome here, Roy,” I said. “I’ll get them.”
They came down the hall in their pajamas, Ben with his hair straight up. They stopped when they saw who it was. Emma took her brother’s hand, which she had not done in a year.
Roy would not sit down. He stood on the mat inside my kitchen door with his cap in his two hands, and he looked at my children, and I watched that old man work himself up to it the way you’d work up to lifting something heavy.
“I was in the room yesterday,” he said. “I heard what your grandmother said. And I sat in my chair and looked at the rug.”
Nobody said anything.
“I have been married fifty years in June. Your grandmother runs the house. She always has. She does the cards and the birthdays and who gets what, and I let her, because she’s good at it and because it was easier. I told myself that was keeping the peace.” He turned the cap around once. “Yesterday easier cost me the look on your face, Ben. I saw it. I’ll see it till I die. A man who sees that and looks at the rug has got no business calling himself anybody’s grandpa.”