The Little White House on Elm Street

He leaned his elbows on the counter while I rang him up, the way he’s done since I was a little girl and he’d bring me in for a sucker after my shots.

He likes to come when I’m working. He says the other girls count too slow.

“How’s that school going, honey?” he asked me.

“Good,” I said. “Hard. I’ve got a pharmacology test Tuesday. Half of it’s stuff I already know from here, which helps.”

He nodded and tapped the counter with one finger. “Well, that twenty-six thousand ought to see you clear through, shouldn’t it? I figured it about right. Your grandma and I always said you’d be the one to go.”

I stopped with his bag in my hand. I didn’t know what he meant.

I honestly thought for a second that he was confused, the way old folks get, and I felt bad for thinking it, because he has never once been confused about a number in his life.

“What twenty-six thousand, Grandpa?”

He looked at me for a long moment over his glasses. Then the lady behind him cleared her throat, and he took his bag, and he said, “Come by the house after work,” and he walked out without his receipt.

Grandpa lives in the same square house on Locust Street that he and Grandma bought in 1971. Grandma died three years ago this past spring.

He still keeps her African violets on the kitchen windowsill, and they still bloom, which I think surprises him as much as anybody.

When I got there he had the coffee on, even though it was nearly six, and two cups out on the oilcloth.

He didn’t sit down. He stood at the counter with his back to me for a minute, and I could see his shoulders working.

“The year you turned sixteen,” he said finally, “I sold the last forty acres of your grandma’s folks’ ground. The piece out by the creek. I had it in my head that you’d go to school, and I didn’t want you starting out owing the government.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I know you didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He turned around.

“I had the bank cut a cashier’s check for twenty-six thousand. Made out to your mother. You were a minor, and I figured she was your mother, so she’d hold it.”

“Did you write anything down?”

“Write what down? She’s my daughter.” He sat then, slow, with one hand on the table.

“I told her it was for your schooling, and she said she’d put it somewhere safe, and that was that. Every Christmas I’d ask how you were coming, and she’d say you were doing fine.”

I told him about the payment plan. I told him about the twenty-four hundred a term, and the student loan I’d taken for my books and my scrubs and the clinical fees.

I told him about the six hundred a month for my old room. I didn’t mean to tell him that part, but it came out.

He didn’t say anything for so long that the furnace kicked on.

Then he took his cap off and set it on the table, and I saw his hand was shaking, and it wasn’t the kind of shaking that comes from being seventy-nine.

“Six hundred,” he said. “For your own room.”

“Since I was eighteen.”