The Checkbook on Grandma’s Kitchen Table

The last one was Grandma’s.

Grandma looked at the row of keys. Then she reached out with one finger and pushed her own key back across the table, until it touched Sandy’s hand.

“Saturdays,” she said. “You’ll need that.”

Sandy put her face down on her arms on my grandmother’s kitchen table and cried, and Grandma reached over and rubbed her back in slow circles, the way she used to rub mine when I had the croup.

I got up and went out on the back porch, because I did not know what else to do.

I called Nate. “It’s over,” I said. “Nobody’s hurt. I’ll tell you tonight.”

“Are you all right?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Grandma knew. She knew the whole time.”

He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Your grandma’s tougher than both of us put together,” and I laughed, standing out there in the cold with no coat on, and then I cried a little too.

Sandy drove to the agency office in town that same morning. I know because Linda, the supervisor, called Grandma at eleven to confirm it.

Linda’s voice on the speakerphone was shaking. She said in twenty years she had never had an aide walk in and turn herself in.

They let Sandy go that afternoon. The agency sent a new aide to Grandma’s the next morning, a young man named Tyler who was kind and on time and could not make coffee to save his life.

Linda changed the codes and the locks at all four of Sandy’s other houses. Mr. Halverson’s son called Grandma that week to ask what had happened, and she told him it was a private matter between her and Sandy and had been settled, and he could talk to Sandy himself.

I will be honest. For a long time, I did not like it. I thought Grandma had been too soft.

I thought Sandy had gotten off easy, and I said so to Nate more than once over the supper dishes.

“She lost a nine-year job,” Nate said one night, drying a pan. “She walked in and told on herself to her own boss in a town of eleven hundred people. And she’s going to spend every Saturday for more than a year working for free for the woman she took it from. I’m not sure what easy looks like, Brooke, but I don’t think it’s that.”

I did not have an answer for that.

Sandy got on at the farm store in town, running a register and stocking the feed aisle, nine dollars less an hour than before.

She kept her Sunday shifts at the bowling alley. And every Saturday at eight o’clock, the maroon Impala came up the lane.

She did the basement shelves in February. She scrubbed every jar of every year of Grandma’s canning and threw out the ones from before I was born.

In March she stripped the wallpaper in the front room. My mother flew home in March, as promised, and came out to the farm on a Saturday ready for a fight.

Mom stood in the doorway of the front room with her arms crossed and watched Sandy on the ladder for about five minutes.

Then she went and got a putty knife out of the porch drawer and climbed up on the other ladder. By noon they were talking about their knees.