The Night Grandpa Harold Danced

Grandpa Harold

My grandparents still live on the home place, eleven miles north of town on a gravel road. Grandpa rents the ground to the Schroeder boys now, but he still walks out to the machine shed every morning.

I was a Bauer before I married one. Jason’s people are from over by Manning and no relation, which Grandpa still says he checked before he walked me down the aisle.

The phone rang five times. They still have the landline on the kitchen wall, and it takes Grandma Mae a while to get to it.

“Bauers,” she said.

“Grandma, it’s Kristin. Is Grandpa still up?”

“He’s watching the weather. What’s wrong, honey? You sound funny.”

I told her. By the time I got to the dress on the closet door, my voice was not steady anymore. Grandma did not say one word about Jason. She just said, “Hold on,” and went into the front room.

Then I heard my grandfather’s walker coming across the kitchen. Step, thump. Step, thump. He fell in the barn two winters ago and has used it ever since. It has tennis balls on its feet so it will not scratch Grandma’s linoleum.

“Kristin,” he said. “What time does it start?”

I had not even asked him yet.

“Six,” I said. “Grandpa, I wasn’t calling to ask you to”

“Yes, you were,” he said. “Mae, where’s my brown suit?”

I heard my grandmother say from across the room that the brown suit would need letting out, and him say it would not, and her say she had eyes.

“Grandpa,” I said. “You have a walker.”

“I know where it is,” he said.

“How are you even going to get there?”

“Same way I get to the co-op every morning,” he said. “In the Buick.”

That was true. He drove to town every morning but Sunday to drink coffee at the co-op, and Dr. Larsen said he could keep at it as long as he stayed off the highway and was home before dark. I work at the pharmacy. I fill his blood pressure pills myself.

“The dance starts at six,” I said. “It’s dark by then.”

“Then I’ll be at your house at a quarter after five, while it’s light, and you can drive us home after,” he said. “I’m eighty eight. I’m not stupid.”

“Let me pick you up, at least.”

There was a pause, and his voice went lower.

“Kristin Ann,” he said. “A man picks up his date.”

Then he handed the phone to my grandmother, and I heard him going step, thump down the hall toward the closet.