Nine Grandparents and a Four Dollar Lunch
“I know you will be,” I said. “And they’ll say it’s board policy, and you’ll lose a day’s pay and nothing will change. Let me try something first. Give me till Monday.”
He looked at his wife on the floor. He looked at me.
“What kind of something?” he said.
“The kind that doesn’t need anybody to be mad at anybody.”
I did not know yet what I meant. I knew only that I had a number on the back of my hand.
At bedtime Austin did not want a story. He wanted me to sit on the edge of his bed with the hall light on.
I was smoothing the dinosaur quilt when he reached under his pillow and pulled out a thick white tube sock. It clinked.
“What’s that, honey?”
“It’s my money.” He held it out to me with both hands, the same way he had carried his tray. “Dimes and some nickels. From the jar. I counted it. It’s $2.35.”
“Austin, I paid the account.”
“I know.” He kept his eyes on the sock. “But Mom said we have to be careful with money this year, and if it’s minus again I’ll have some. For the minus.”
I did not say anything for a moment. I couldn’t have.
I took the sock. I put it back into his two hands and closed his fingers over it.
“That’s yours,” I said. “You can keep it, or you can give it away someday. That part is up to you.”
“Okay.”
“Austin. What happened today was not about you. You didn’t do one wrong thing.”
“I know.” But he did not know. “Brayden said I was a negative.”
“Brayden is seven, honey.”
That got me the smallest smile.
“Nana?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Mrs. Whitlock said sorry. When she gave me the sandwich. She said it really quiet. She was kind of crying.”
“I saw her.”
“I think she didn’t want to do it.”
“Nana doesn’t think Mrs. Whitlock made that rule, honey,” I said. “I think somebody far away wrote it down, and she’s the one who has to hand out the bag.”
“So it’s not her fault.”
“It’s not yours, either. Go to sleep.”
I sat there with the hall light on until his breathing slowed. Then I went downstairs and got out my address book.
The Cenex station on Highway 36 serves the best coffee in the county for a dollar, and at 6:30 on Friday morning the back table was already full. That table belongs to the same eight or nine retired people: three farmers, a retired school bus driver, a widowed Methodist, two women from the Catholic bake sale, a man who sold insurance for forty years. Every one of them is somebody’s grandparent, and nearly every one has a grandchild in the Orrin schools.
I sat down with my coffee and I did not say hello. I put the pink receipt on the table. Then I told them what had happened, in the order that it happened, in the same voice I would use to read a grocery list.
Nobody interrupted. Lloyd Bauman, who drove the number six bus for thirty-one years and whom every child in Orrin still calls Mr. Lloyd, turned his cup around and around in his big hands.