The Four Words I Wrote Every Time
“It hasn’t come through yet,” Tiffany said.
She stood on the inside of the storm door with her phone in her hand, looking at the screen and not at me. I stood on the outside of it, on my own son’s front step, with a pan of rhubarb bars going cold in my arms.
It was the third Saturday in April outside Minot, North Dakota, which means it was thirty-four degrees and the wind was coming straight out of the northwest with nothing between us and Saskatchewan to slow it down.
“I sent it from the driveway,” I said. “Before I got out of the car.”
“Well. It hasn’t come through.”
Behind her knees, my granddaughter had both hands pressed flat against the glass. Lily was four. She was in her pink pajamas with the feet in them, even though it was one in the afternoon, and she was breathing little fog circles on the door and smiling at me through them. Her brother Mason, who was still six that spring, stood back by the couch with his arms at his sides, watching his mother’s phone the way you watch a pot.
I could have knocked on the glass. I did not. I shifted the pan to my other arm and I waited, because by then I had learned exactly how this worked.
Then the phone made its little sound.
Tiffany read it. I watched her eyes go across the line I had typed, the same line I had typed the two times before, and I watched her not react to it.
“There it is,” she said. She flipped the lock and pushed the door open.
I did not step in yet. I looked her in the eye.
“Tiffany, I will pay this as long as you ask,” I said. “But you will never hear me say it is right.”
“Shoes off, please,” she said. “I just did the floors.”
Lily hit my knees so hard I nearly lost the bars.
That was the third time I paid fifty dollars to see my grandchildren. There would be eleven more.
I should tell you how it started, because nobody believes it when I say it flat.
My son Scott is a pipeline welder. For nine years he worked the oil patch west of us and was home for supper most nights. Then the work thinned out, and last winter he was laid off from the week before Thanksgiving clear to the first of March. When a contractor out of Tulsa offered him a spot on a gas line job outside Liberal, Kansas, he took it. Six days a week, ten hours a day, good money and a per diem, and nine hundred miles straight down Highway 83 between him and his own kitchen table.
He left on a Sunday, the ninth of March, with his welder bolted in the bed of his pickup.
“Seven, eight months,” he had told me the night before. “I’ll get home if I can, but it’s two days of driving every time, Mom. Look after them for me.”
“You know I will.”
I had been looking after them since they were born. I live six blocks from Scott and Tiffany, in the house my husband Dale and I bought in 1989. Dale has been gone four years. Since Mason was a baby I had kept the kids every Tuesday while Tiffany worked the front desk at a dental office in Minot, and I had never thought of it as anything but the best day of my week.