The Name in the Thursday Paper

Grandma Ruth’s coffee

It was Grandma Ruth who did it. I did not ask her to. I would not have known how.

She called Sharon herself on the Wednesday and invited her for coffee Thursday morning. Sharon told her she was busy. Grandma Ruth told her she would make the sour cream coffee cake, and that she was 84, and that she did not know how many more coffee cakes she had in her, so Sharon had better come.

Sharon came.

Grandma Ruth asked me to be there too. “You sit in the corner with that baby and feed him,” she said, “and don’t you say a word unless I look at you.”

So I sat in the rocker in the corner of her little kitchen in town, the house she and Grandpa moved to when they sold the farm, and nursed Wyatt under a blanket. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and the percolator. Grandpa James had gone uptown to the café on purpose.

Sharon sat at the table with her coat still on. She looked at me once, and then at the coffee cake, and then at her hands.

Grandma Ruth poured the coffee and cut two pieces and sat down across from her, and for a while they talked about the weather and the price of propane and whose daughter was getting married in June. Then Grandma Ruth set down her fork.

“Sharon,” she said, “I want to tell you about the year 1962.”

Sharon looked up.

“I was twenty. James and I had been married a year and a half, and we were living on his folks’ place, in the little house across the yard from the big house. My son was born the second week of January, in a blizzard. Dr. Larson came out on the county plow.”

I had never heard this. I stopped rocking.

“I wanted to name him Daniel,” Grandma Ruth said. “I had wanted to name a boy Daniel since I was nine years old. It was my grandfather’s name, and he was the one person in my whole childhood who never once raised his voice to me.”

She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

“James’s mother wanted him named Lloyd, after her father. She did not raise her voice. She just told the pastor Lloyd, and the church ladies Lloyd. By the time I was out of bed, the whole township was calling him Lloyd.”

“So you let it go,” Sharon said.

“I let it go,” Grandma Ruth said. “And I want to tell you what it cost, because nobody told me.”

She did not hurry. She never hurries.

“It cost me twenty years of that woman,” she said. “I was polite to her at every Christmas and every harvest dinner. I never once sat next to her if I could help it. I never let her teach me her pie crust, and she made the best in the county.”

Sharon was watching her now, close.

“She’s been gone since 1989,” Grandma Ruth said. “Only after, cleaning out her cedar chest, did I learn her father was the one person who was ever soft with her. He walked her to the school bus every morning. She wanted that name in the house. That was all.”

She reached across the table and put her hand flat on top of Sharon’s hand.

“I lost a son’s name in 1962,” she said, “and I got over it. My boy grew up a good man named Lloyd. What I never got over was that I didn’t ask her why. Two women in the same kitchen for twenty years, too proud to ask one plain question.”

Nobody said anything. The percolator ticked. Wyatt came off the breast and sighed and fell asleep with his mouth open.

Sharon looked down at Grandma Ruth’s hand on top of hers. Then she looked across the kitchen at me.

“I should have asked,” she said. Her voice was not bright anymore. It was very small. “I should have asked you, Kelsey. I was afraid you’d say no. And then I’d have to hear you say it.”

“I might have said no,” I said. Grandma Ruth did not look at me, so I figured I was allowed. “But I would have said it kindly. And I would have wanted to know why.”

Sharon nodded. She picked up her fork and ate a bite of the coffee cake, and then another, and then she started to cry, quietly, with her coat still on, and Grandma Ruth just let her.

When she left, she stopped by the rocker and looked down at Wyatt asleep in my arms. She did not touch him. She just looked.

“Wyatt,” she said, very softly. Like a word in a language she was only starting to learn.

Then she went out to her car.