The Letter My Grandfather Read

Mark and I had saved $3,500 and made a plain plan: the Grange hall for $850, pulled pork, Aunt Kim’s cake. Gus ate Mark’s pot roast that Sunday and asked about everything but the wedding. Then, at the door, with his hat in his hand, he said, “Your mother tell you she’s not coming?”

“How did you…”

“She told me herself. At church.” He turned the hat a quarter turn. “I’m sorry for that, Bree.”

“It’s okay, Grandpa. We’re doing it small. It’ll be nice.”

“I’m sure it will,” he said. He kissed the top of my head, which he had not done since grade school, and went out to his Buick.

Two days later I was in the produce aisle at the grocery when Doris Fenn, who has played the organ at the Methodist church for thirty-six years, put a hand on my elbow and said, “Honey, I’m so happy for you. That Grange hall is going to be just beautiful. And what a blessing, with it all paid for.”

“Paid for?” I said.

Doris looked at her cart like a woman who had just said the thing she’d been told not to say.

I put down my lettuce and drove straight to my grandfather’s house on Walnut.

He was on the front porch with the crossword and a glass of tea. He saw my face and set the pencil down.

“Grandpa. What did you do?”

“Sit down, Bree.”

“Doris said the caterer too.”

“Well, I called Hank Dobbins over in Sweet Springs about the barbecue,” he said mildly. “Thirty-eight dollars a plate for a hundred and ten. I put it on my account.”

“That’s four thousand dollars.”

“Four thousand one hundred eighty. The hall is eight-fifty, and a band that does the old stuff, and I’m covering the flowers because I can’t stand a wedding with no flowers. Nell would haunt me.” He sipped his tea. “Near nine thousand six hundred, all told. I wrote it down.”

“I can’t take that.”

“You’re not taking it. I’m giving it.”

“You’re on a fixed income!”

“I sold a grocery store, Bree. Sit down.”

I sat.

“When you were born,” he said, “your grandmother opened a savings account at the Farmers and Merchants. Twenty dollars a month out of the grocery money. She called it the Bree account. I asked what it was for and she said, ‘For when she needs it.’ That’s all she’d say. She put in twenty dollars a month for twenty-three years, and I never stopped after she passed. I didn’t know what else to do with them.”

He tapped the pad.

“With the interest, that carries most of this. The rest is mine, and glad to give it.”

He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“It’s the best money I ever spent, honey, because it’s the only money I ever spent that your grandmother told me where to put.”

I put my face in my hands. After a while I felt his hand, big and dry and spotted, settle on the back of my head.

“I should have done more,” he said, so low I almost missed it. “A long time ago. I watched, Bree. I won’t tell you I didn’t. Your grandmother told me every year to say something to your mother, and I told her it would sort itself out. I was a coward about my own daughter and I let you pay for it.”

“Grandpa…”

“Let an old man do one thing right.”

I did not argue anymore.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he added. “Not yet. People take a thing better when they find it out themselves.”