The Day I Set Down My Cane
Our granddaughter’s name is Codi, Cordelia on the baptism certificate, but nobody called her that past the age of three.
She was a bright, loud, freckled kid who ran everywhere and could back a trailer to the barn door at twelve. She spent her summers out here with Lorraine and me. Her father left when she was six, for Arizona and a different life, and she hung on to me with both hands the day he went.
She got hurt at eighteen. A truck ran a stop sign north of town and put her little Ford in the ditch, and her back cracked in two places. The doctor in the county seat gave her pills, and then more, and I do not blame the doctor and I do not blame the girl. I only know a person can go into a hospital a sturdy young woman and come home owing something to the bottle.
By nineteen she was not the same. By twenty she was somebody I could not find.
One Sunday after dinner, she was in the kitchen alone for ten minutes. Lorraine took her wedding band off to do the dishes, the way she always did, and set it in the little blue saucer by the sink. When Lorraine went to dry her hands, the saucer was empty. Codi’s car was already pulling out of the lane.
Lorraine stood at that sink and said nothing. She dried her hands.
“She’ll bring it back,” Lorraine said.
“Maybe.”
“She’ll bring it back when she can look at me.”
My wife was right about most things. She was right about that, though she did not live to see it.
Codi got arrested the week after her twentieth birthday, for possession and for passing a check that was not hers, and she did thirty days. That is where Sheila’s two-in-the-morning phone call comes from. When she got out, she did not go home. She went to a treatment program in Wichita, ninety days, and I drove her there myself. She sat in the passenger seat of my truck with her arms wrapped round her middle, and for sixty miles she did not say a word.
At the front door of the place, she said, “Grandpa, I’m sorry about the ring.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m going to get it back.”
“It’s a ring, Codi.”
“It’s Grandma’s,” she said. And she went in.
That was five years and four months ago.
I will not tell the whole climb. She came home from Wichita and slept on my sofa for a year, because she could not live with her mother and her mother could not stand to have her. She washed dishes at the Lindley Cafe. She went to meetings in the basement of the Lutheran church three nights a week, and I drove her when her license was suspended, and sat in the truck and listened to the ball game.
Then came the nursing assistant course, nights, paid for a hundred and ten dollars at a time. The first morning she wore her scrubs, she turned around slowly in my kitchen.
“What do you think?” she said.
“They fit.”
“They fit you fine,” I said, and had to go look at something in the yard.
She has worked third shift at Prairie View Care Center ever since, the one nobody wants. She learned who liked the radio on and who couldn’t stand the dark. She held the hands of a dozen people when they died, so they would not do it alone.
She sat with Lorraine, too.