The Four Words I Wrote Every Time
Thirteen days after he left, on a Saturday morning, I made a tater tot hotdish, the kind Mason likes with the corn in it, and I sent Tiffany a text. I wrote, “Made a hotdish. Could I bring it by and see the kids a while this afternoon?”
Then my phone buzzed, and it was not a text.
It was the pay app. Scott had put it on my phone two Christmases back so I could send birthday money without hunting for a stamp. “Just send it to my name, Mom,” he had said. “It’s the one account. Me and Tiff both have it on our phones.”
The screen said: Tiffany requests $50.00. And underneath, in the place for a message: For the disruption to their schedule.
I read it standing at my stove with the oven mitts still on.
I thought she had hit the wrong button. So I did the sensible thing. I called her.
“I think you sent me something by accident,” I said.
“It’s not an accident.”
“Tiffany, it says fifty dollars.”
“I know what it says.” Her voice was perfectly level. She sounded like the girl at the clinic telling you your copay. “Carol Ann, I’m on my own over here now. I’ve got them on a routine. When you come, Lily doesn’t nap and Mason won’t settle down for his reading, and I’m the one who pays for it the whole rest of the day. My time is worth something. If you want to come, that’s what it costs.”
“I’m their grandmother.”
“And I’m their mother. You can come at one. It needs to go through first.”
She hung up.
I could refuse. I could say I would not pay one red cent to walk into my own son’s house. And then I would be right, and I would be sitting six blocks away being right, and Lily would turn five without me.
Or I could pay it.
I opened the request. Under the amount there was a little gray box that said Add a note.
I typed four words.
To see my grandbabies.
I pushed the button. I put foil on the hotdish. And at one o’clock I was on that step.
People who hear this always ask me the same thing. Why didn’t you just call your son?
I did call him. Once.
It was the very next evening, Sunday the twenty-third. Scott’s crew was working a stretch of right-of-way out in the grassland, where a phone shows one bar on a good day. He picked up, and I heard “Mom?” and then nothing. I called back. I got as far as “Scott, Tiffany sent me a” and it dropped again.
A few minutes later a text came through. “No signal out here. You okay? Will call Sunday.”
He must have sent one to Tiffany too, asking whether his mother was all right. Because on Wednesday, when I asked to stop by, there was no bill. There was one word. “No.”
I asked again that Saturday. “Not this week.”
The Saturday after that, the bill came back, and a text ahead of it. “You can come at one. Don’t go around me again.”
So that was the price of telling him. Tiffany held the door. She did not have to charge me at all. She could just say no, and keep saying no until November. And Scott, nine hundred miles off, under a welding hood ten hours a day, could do nothing from Kansas but fight with his wife on a phone that would not hold a call, or quit a job his family needed.