The Letter My Grandfather Read
“I let you carry it a long time.”
“Grandpa, look at me.” I lifted my head. “I had you. I always had you. I just didn’t know that was enough until she said so.”
His hand shook against my cheek.
“I’d like a dance,” I said, “if you’ve got it in you. The one that’s supposed to be my father’s.”
“I can’t dance, Bree.”
“Neither can Mark. That’s why I’m asking you.”
Lloyd was already tuning. When my grandfather stood, a little unsteady, and gave me his arm, the band went into “The Tennessee Waltz,” which had been my grandmother’s song. Gus had danced it with her at her fiftieth birthday, and her sixtieth, and in the hospital room at the end, with the oxygen hissing and her feet on top of his, because she insisted.
We went out onto the empty floor, a thin old man in a gray suit and his granddaughter in a tea-length dress, and I put my hand on his shoulder and he put his hand in mine.
He did not dance well. He shuffled a half step behind the beat, and he trod on my hem once and said, “Sorry, sorry,” and I said, “It’s fine,” and neither of us could stop smiling.
“She’d have said I was leading wrong,” he said, and turned me in a slow, careful circle. The doors stood open on the field, and the light had gone long and gold, and a few leaves blew across the threshold and skittered over the boards. “I think she’s here, Bree. I don’t say that to be foolish. I just think it.”
“I think so too.”
He bent close to my ear.
“You were always enough,” my grandfather said, the old words in his own voice. “I am sorry it took her to say it.”
And I cried the way I had not let myself cry since my father’s funeral, openly, in the middle of a dance floor, with my forehead on the shoulder of a gray suit that smelled of cedar and starch and a little of the market he’d sold. Nobody looked away. Nobody pretended not to see. A hundred and twelve people stood in the Grange hall and let me.
My mother did not call that night.
She didn’t call the next day, or the next week. For ten days I checked my phone like a woman checking a pot. On the eleventh I realized I had gone a whole morning without looking, and I felt the strangest thing: a quiet, and underneath it, relief.
I had spent my life auditioning for a part in my mother’s love, and it had never once gone well, and I had never once stopped trying out. Now there was no one in the dark seats. I had stepped down off the stage, and the world went on, and I could hear my own breath.
At Thanksgiving, Brandi hosted, and my mother’s chair was empty. Brandi had set a place for her anyway and called her twice that week to say so. “We miss you, Mom,” she told the answering machine. “The chair’s yours whenever you can sit in it.” My mother never picked up. Brandi cried over the gravy boat, and nobody said a word about it, and we passed the rolls around the gap.