The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
And then I stood in my grandmother’s hallway on Thanksgiving with my hand on a brass dial that said 60.
It was April when Travis found out.
He came home on a Thursday, later than usual, and he did not go straight to the shower the way he always does. He sat down at my kitchen table in his work clothes and folded his hands on the oilcloth. I was making tacos. I turned the burner down.
“What happened?” I said. “Did somebody get hurt?”
“Nobody got hurt.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We were replacing a pole on Main, down by the pecan buying station. Dale Hadley came out to visit while we were waiting on the digger truck.”
I knew Dale. Everyone knew Dale. He has run the buying station in town for thirty years, and his father ran it before that. He ushers at the Methodist church and coaches pee-wee baseball in the summer.
“He asked how Opal was doing,” Travis said. “I said she was fine. And he said…” Travis stopped. “He said, ‘Those trees of hers made Sherry a fine crop again. Nearly two thousand pounds. Best Stuarts I bought all year.'”
I set the spatula down.
“Two thousand pounds,” I said.
“That’s what he said.”
I did the math standing at the stove, the way I imagine everybody in pecan country does it. I did not even have to think about the price. Everybody knew what pecans had been bringing.
“That’s seven thousand dollars,” I said.
“About that. Maybe a little under. Dale said he paid her about the same the year before.”
I sat down across from him. The tacos could burn. “She told Grandma the squirrels got them.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Did you say anything to Dale?”
Travis looked at his hands. “No,” he said. “I thought about it. I had four men standing right there and a crowd at the gas station across the street. I wasn’t going to put your grandmother’s business out on Main Street before I’d even told you.”
I understood that. That is exactly who Travis is. He will not embarrass a person in public, even a person who has it coming, and he would never embarrass my grandmother.
“What do we do?” I said.
He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “First you go talk to your grandma. She’s the one it belongs to.”
I drove out to the home place that Saturday with a coffee cake and no idea how to begin.
Grandma was on the porch swing in a sweater, which meant the afternoon was warm. She watched me come up the steps with the cake and said, “You’ve got something on your mind, Amy Lynn. You always bring cake when you’ve got something on your mind.”
So I sat down beside her on the swing and I told her everything Travis told me. Dale, the two thousand pounds, the seven thousand dollars, two years running.
She did not cry. She did not even look surprised. She pushed the swing with one foot and looked out at the grove, which was just starting to leaf out, that soft pale green pecans get late in spring after everything else has already greened up.
“I wondered,” she said finally.
“You knew?”
“I didn’t know. I wondered.” She kept the swing going. “A thin crop doesn’t take a man two days with a shaker, honey. I heard that machine running from the kitchen. And I’ve lived under those trees sixty-some years. I know what a thin year looks like on the ground, and that wasn’t one.”