The Night Grandpa Harold Danced

Saturday morning

My grandmother had the coffee on by six, as she has every morning since 1958. By seven my grandfather was at the table in flannel and suspenders, eating oatmeal with brown sugar. He looked like he had been hit by a truck, and happier than I had seen him since he fell.

“How are the legs?” I asked.

“Which ones,” he said.

At 7:25 headlights came up the lane. It was Jason’s gray Silverado with the co-op sticker. It parked by the machine shed and sat there running for almost two minutes.

Then the engine shut off, and Jason got out. He had not shaved. He came across the yard with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears, the way he walks when he knows he is in trouble.

My grandmother opened the back door before he could knock. She looked at him for a long second.

“Wipe your feet,” she said, and let him in.

He stood in the mudroom with his cap in his hands. I stayed at the table with my coffee and waited.

“Harold,” he said. “Mae. Kristin.”

“Jason,” my grandfather said. He did not stop eating his oatmeal.

“I came to say,” Jason started. Then he stopped and looked at the floor and started over. “I don’t have a good reason. I want to say that first. I don’t have one.”

“Then don’t make one up,” my grandfather said. “Sit down.”

Jason sat. My grandmother set coffee in front of him, black, because she has known how he takes it for fourteen years and the divorce did not change that.

Why

It came out of him slow, over that cup of coffee. Since the divorce he had been working sixty hours a week, seventy at harvest, because the child support and his rent and the truck payment left no room. He ate standing at the counter. He was not sleeping.

“And then Amber,” he said. “Everything else is hard. Work is hard. Half of what Ellie needs, I don’t know how to do. Amber’s just easy. She wanted this weekend, and I didn’t want a fight. I told myself Ellie wouldn’t care that much.”

He looked at me then, for the first time.

“I didn’t want to go stand in a gym and not know how to dance with my kid,” he said. “I don’t know how to dance. I’d have just stood there. I thought she’d be embarrassed.”

My grandfather set his spoon down in his bowl.

“So instead,” he said, “she got to be embarrassed that you didn’t come.”

Jason did not say anything to that. There was nothing to say.

“She hid under a quilt with her shoes on,” I said quietly. “She asked me if it was because of her.”

Jason put his hand over his eyes and sat like that.

I could have said a lot more. But I did not need to. Three men had texted him on a Friday night to say an eighty eight year old with a walker had stood in for him. In our town, that would follow him to the co-op scale and the church parking lot for a long time, and he knew it.