The Cardboard Combine on Main Street

The Supper

We brought it over the Sunday before the parade. Amy and Jared live in a newer house on the east edge of town, out past the school, with a big kitchen and an island in the middle that Brody uses as a racetrack.

I carried the combine in from the truck with a sheet over it. Brody was at the door before I got it up the steps. Amy was laughing.

She had known about it the whole three weeks and kept her mouth shut, which for my daughter is about the same record as Brody’s twenty minutes.

I pulled the sheet off in the living room. Brody stood there with his mouth open.

Then he climbed into it so fast he nearly put a foot through the side, and I got the suspenders on him and clicked the flashlights on, and he was gone.

He ran laps around that kitchen island for ten minutes, making the engine noise, backing up with a beeping sound, unloading imaginary corn into the dog’s water dish.

Amy took pictures on her phone. Darlene cried a little and pretended it was the onions in the roast.

I sat at the table and watched him, and I was about as happy as I had been since I sold the last of the machinery.

I won’t pretend otherwise. A man who has done one kind of work all his life does not always know what to do with his hands when it stops.

Then Jared’s car pulled in, and he came through the garage door with that plastic bag, and you know the rest of that part.

After Brody started crying, Jared looked surprised. I think he honestly expected the boy to be happy about the suit.

He looked at Amy, and Amy did not look back, and then he looked at me.

“I didn’t mean anything by it, Leon,” he said. “It’s a nice job. It’s just a lot of box for a little kid.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

It was not all right. But I said it.

Why I Didn’t Argue

I have had people ask me since why I didn’t just tell him off right there at the table.

I am a big man, and I have been known to have opinions. Darlene says I can clear a co-op meeting in three sentences when I want to.

The plain answer is that it was not my house, and it was not my boy. It was my daughter’s husband, in my daughter’s kitchen, talking to his own son.

How a man raises his child is his to answer for, not mine, and I have known too many grandparents who forgot that.

The other answer is Amy. Whatever I said at that table, she would have to live with after our taillights went down the road.

I have watched her marriage for eleven years. It is a good one, mostly. I was not going to be the reason it had a bad night.

So I looked at my grandson, who was standing there with tears on his cheeks and his combine still on, and I said the only thing I could think of that would not make it worse.

“That’s a good-looking suit, Brody,” I said. “Those are some muscles.”

He sniffed and looked at me to see if I meant it. I nodded.

And then he let his dad unclip the suspenders and lift the combine off, and Jared handed it to me, a little awkward, like a man handing back a casserole dish.

I carried it out to my truck and set it in the bed and put the sheet back over it.

When I came in, Brody was in the bathroom with Amy, trying on the superhero suit. I could hear her telling him he looked strong.

We ate the roast. Nobody said much. Jared talked about a doctor’s office in Spencer that had switched to a new system.

I said that sounded like a headache. Darlene asked about the school play. Brody came out in the red suit and ate three bites and asked to be excused.

When we left, he hugged me at the door in that suit, and his foam muscles squeaked against my coat. “Thanks for the combine, Grandpa,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

That one about took me apart. A six-year-old should not have to apologize for a present.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “You look like a champion.”