The Letter My Grandfather Read
My father died when I was twelve. Ron Hollis, forty-four years old, a heart attack on the loading dock at the grain elevator in the middle of harvest. He was gone before the ambulance made the turn off Route 9. He was the one who came to my things. He sat on the cold bleachers at every one of my track meets and shouted my name in a voice that carried across the whole field, and I ran faster because I knew exactly where he was.
After he died there was a payout from the co-op, sixty thousand dollars. My mother paid Brandi’s tuition and apartment at Mizzou out of it, all four years. When I graduated high school, I asked, carefully, at the kitchen table, what there was for me.
“There isn’t much left,” my mother said, and began wiping a clean counter. “You’re a smart girl. You’ll find a way. You always do.”
I found a way. I took night classes in Sedalia while I worked days at the vet clinic on Route 9, and I earned my technician certificate on my own dime. When I finished, my mother threw me a cookout in the backyard. Hot dogs, a sheet cake from the Walmart, and a banner she’d made on the computer that was spelled right but a little crooked. When Brandi graduated from Mizzou, she had rented the banquet room at the Holiday Inn.
When Brandi married at thirty, my mother paid for all of it. Two hundred guests at the event center by the highway. A band. A photographer. Twenty-eight thousand dollars. I was maid of honor, and when the photographer asked for “the family,” my mother stood in the middle of the shot with her arm around Brandi and said over her shoulder, “Bree, honey, can you step out a little? You’re throwing off the symmetry.”
I stepped out.
I always stepped out. I never made a scene. I carried it for thirty-four years like a stone in my coat pocket, and I smiled, and I brought the potato salad.
I never said any of it because I knew what would happen. I tried once, at twenty-two, and my mother looked at me with calm, flat pity, as if I had gotten confused about my own life, and said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Then she didn’t call for three weeks. I learned that she could wait longer than I could.
So when she said lost cause on the phone, I understood something that wasn’t new. I only understood it all at once. I was done auditioning.
My grandfather came to Sunday dinner the weekend after the phone call.
Gus Hollander is eighty-four. He is my mother’s father. He ran Hollander’s Market on Main Street for forty-one years, which means he knows everybody in Marlow Creek by name and, worse, by what they buy. He is not a big talker. He listens until you have said all of it, and then he says one sentence, and it is usually the right one.
My grandmother Nell died eleven years ago in March. Pancreatic cancer, four months from the first scare to the church. She kept the birthday list on the refrigerator, and when she was gone the whole family went a little quieter and a little colder.