The Little White House on Elm Street

“Easy. Easy. Lift with your legs, honey, not your back. You’re a nurse, you know that better than I do. There. Set her down.”

Mom didn’t come out. I saw her through the kitchen window once, standing at the sink with her arms folded, and when she saw me look she stepped back out of sight. The door to the garage stayed shut.

My dad has lived in Missouri since I was six. He sends a card on my birthday most years, with twenty dollars in it, and that’s about the size of it.

I didn’t call him. Grandpa was the only man I needed in that driveway, and he was already there.

We filled the truck bed right up to the tailgate. Grandpa strapped it down with two ratchet straps, the way he does everything, and tested each one with a tug.

Then he climbed in behind the wheel and I followed him across town in my car.

Elm Street in October is the prettiest street in town. The maples go yellow all at once, and the leaves come down all over the sidewalks and the porch steps, and they stick to your shoes. I’d driven down it a thousand times and never noticed.

Grandpa parked his blue pickup at the curb out front of the little white house.

He dropped the tailgate, settled his seed cap down on his white hair, and picked up the heaviest box in the load, the one with my school books.

“Grandpa, let me get that one.”

“You get the next one,” he said. “I’m not dead yet.”

He started up the five porch steps with that box in both arms, slow and careful, one hand on the rail.

I grabbed another box off the tailgate and walked along next to him with my arms full, the leaves sliding under my shoes.

We were halfway up the steps when I heard a car door close behind us.

It was Mom. She’d followed us across town. She had pulled her car into the driveway beside the house, and she was standing next to it with her purse on her shoulder and her keys still in her hand.

“Dad,” she said. “You don’t have to do this.”

Grandpa stopped on the step. He didn’t turn around right away.

“She’s making a point,” Mom said. Her voice was steady, but it was higher than usual. “Let her make it by herself. You’ve got a bad back. You’re seventy-nine years old.”

Grandpa set his box down on the porch rail. He brushed the front of his chore coat off with both hands, the way he always did before church.

Then he turned around and walked back down the steps to her, slow, the way he walks now.

I had never once in my life heard my grandfather raise his voice at my mother. He didn’t raise it then, either. He stopped close enough to touch her.

“Tracy,” he said.

I stayed on the steps with my box. I didn’t mean to listen, but it was a small yard, and a quiet street, and a Saturday, and a man two houses down had stopped raking.

“I owe you something,” Grandpa said. “I’ve owed it a long time, and I’m going to say it here, because I’m too old to wait for a better place.”

Mom didn’t say anything. She held her keys.

“When Mike got married I gave him that money for his house. And when Gene left you, I told you that you’d made your bed.” He shook his head.