The Eleven Widows I Called That Night
Not one of them said no.
I hung up the last time at twenty past nine with my ear hot and my hand shaking a little.
It was not that I had done anything. It was that they had been waiting. Every one of them. I could hear it in how fast they said yes. Eleven women sitting in eleven quiet houses with their televisions on, and all it took was somebody calling to say a child needed them on Friday.
By Wednesday noon it had gotten away from me. You cannot telephone eleven Methodist women on a Tuesday night in a town of forty-five hundred and expect the matter to still be private at breakfast.
Harold caught me in the fellowship hall after the midweek Bible study, with his cap in his hands. Harold farmed four hundred acres north of town until his knees quit, and he lost his Betty the winter before last.
“I hear you’re taking grandmothers up to the school,” he said.
“I am.”
“You taking any grandfathers?”
I had not thought of it, and I am ashamed to say so. I had skipped right over the men, as though a little boy would not want a grandpa who could tell him what a combine does.
“Harold, I would be glad to have you. But you’re not on the reading list. You’d have to go up to the school office and fill out the district’s volunteer form and let them run your background. It takes a few days.”
“I got nine,” he said. “And I got nothing to hide but a speeding ticket from 1986.”
“Then go fill it out.”
“I got a children’s book about harvest machinery. I bought it for my grandson in Colorado, and he got too old for it before I got it sent. I never did get to read it to anybody.”
“You bring it.”
He brought three friends up to that office with him. Don, who was a lineman for the power district for thirty years. Bill, who ran the hardware store. And Ray, who was an Army medic and is deaf as a fence post in his left ear. Four widowers. All four came back clear by the next Tuesday.
And then there was Gene.
Gene is not a widower. His wife, Kay, is alive and well and runs the altar guild. Gene drove a school bus in Hamilton County for thirty-one years, and he still drives the activity bus to away games when they are short, so the district checks him every fall whether he likes it or not.
“I drove half those kids’ parents,” he said. “Thirty-one years of children, and I never once got to sit down with one.”
So that made sixteen, and me.
Ms. Keller did her part. A second note went home that Wednesday, to all fifty-eight second grade families. It said Grandparents Day was back on. It said that any child whose grandparents could not come would be joined, if the family wished, by a volunteer from the school’s own reading helpers, people already cleared to work with children. There was a slip at the bottom to tear off and send back. Yes or no.
She called me the following Monday.
“Twenty-three,” she said. “I was right about the number. I wish I had not been.”
“Any say no?”
“Not one so far. Four slips I’m still chasing. I’ll telephone those myself.”
“And you’ve got seventeen of us.”
“Mrs. Brandt, that is six short.”
“No, ma’am. It is six of us with a child on each side. I have never met a grandmother who could not manage two.”