The Checkbook on Grandma’s Kitchen Table

Grandma kept the tally herself, on the calendar from the co-op that hung inside the cupboard door. Every Saturday she made a little mark with her pencil and wrote the running total underneath, the same way she did her statement.

I would open the cupboard for a glass and see it there. Six. Seven. Eight. A hundred and fifty dollars at a time.

In April, the first Saturday after Easter, Sandy brought Ashley.

I was out there that day, sorting Grandma’s old Sunday school papers for the church history. I heard the Impala, and two doors instead of one.

I looked out the kitchen window and saw a thin girl in a gray hooded sweatshirt standing in the yard with her hands in her pockets, looking at the house like it might bite her.

Sandy brought her in through the back porch. “Evelyn,” she said. “This is Ashley. She asked if she could come.”

Ashley stood on the rag rug. She was nineteen and she looked about fourteen. She had her mother’s chin and her hair was pulled back tight, and she kept her eyes on the floor.

“I know what my mom did,” Ashley said, to the floor. “I know it was for me. I wanted to say I’m sorry. And I wanted to help. If you’ll let me.”

Grandma looked at her for a long moment from her chair. Then she said, “Can you roll a pie crust?”

Ashley looked up for the first time. “No, ma’am.”

“Well,” Grandma said, “that’s a shame at nineteen. Come back in May. The rhubarb’s not up yet.”

She came back in May. The second Saturday, when the rhubarb by the old windmill was thick and red and up past your knees.

Grandma could not bend to pick it anymore, so she stood at the edge of the patch with her cane and pointed, and Ashley cut it with Grandma’s paring knife and pulled the big leaves off and laid the stalks in the dishpan like they were made of glass.

I was there for that day too. I am glad I was. I would not trade it.

Grandma made her crust with lard, the way her mother-in-law had taught her, and ice water from the tap with a few cubes floating in the glass.

She would not let Ashley use a recipe card. She made her do it by feel, the flour on the board, the cold fat cut in with two butter knives until it looked like small peas.

“Don’t handle it like it owes you money,” Grandma said. “Light. Just enough to hold it. The more you fuss it, the tougher it gets.”

The first crust tore in three places. Ashley’s face went red and her jaw set, and I saw her about to quit.

She looked exactly like one of my third graders who has gotten a problem wrong in front of the class.

Grandma saw it too. She put her spotted old hand over Ashley’s young one on the rolling pin and held it there.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Grandma said. “When I was nineteen, I had made a mess of some things too. I won’t say what. It’s between me and the Lord and your mother’s not the only one in this county who’s done something she’s ashamed of. And my husband’s mother didn’t give me a sermon about it. She put a rolling pin in my hand. Just like this.”

Ashley did not say anything. Her shoulders were shaking.

“You’ll tear a crust,” Grandma said. “Everybody tears a crust. You pinch it back together and you go on. Nobody at the table ever knows. That’s the whole secret of pie, honey. That’s about the whole secret of everything.”