The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
“Grandma.” I felt sick. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because she’s my daughter.” She said it simply, like the answer to a math problem. “And Ronnie’s sick. And I figured if she needed it that bad, she needed it worse than I did.”
“You’re keeping your heat at sixty.”
“I’ve got a good coat.”
“Grandma.”
She patted my knee. “I’m 88 years old. I lived through winters in this house before we ever had propane. Sixty is not going to kill me.”
I took a breath. “I want to call the sheriff.”
The swing stopped.
My grandmother turned and looked at me, and for a second I saw the woman who raised two girls on this place and buried a husband and ran the church nursery for forty years. She did not raise her voice. She never has.
“No, ma’am,” she said. “You will not. She is my daughter. Those are my trees, and they’re mine to take back. They are not the sheriff’s to fight over.”
“Then what do we do?”
She looked back out at the grove. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we pick them ourselves this year.”
That was the plan, and it was hers as much as mine. When the crop came, we would pick it up as a family, the way we did when Grandpa was alive. We would sell it to Dale, and the check would be made out to Opal Reese.
“If Sherry calls about hiring the shaker man,” Grandma said, “I’ll tell her I’ve got help this year. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“That’s the truth.”
“Then that’s all I’ll tell her.”
The trees took their time, the way pecans do. The nuts filled through August and September. The shucks started splitting in October. And at the end of October, the first hard frost came through, and the leaves started coming down yellow, and the nuts came down with them.
Sherry called Grandma the last week of October. I was not there, but Grandma told me about it on the phone that night.
“She asked if I wanted her to call Ricky about shaking,” Grandma said. “I told her no, thank you, I had help this year. Amy and Travis and the kids were going to pick them up.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything for a minute.” Grandma paused. “Then she said that was a lot of work for a family, and was I sure. And I said I was sure.”
“Was that all?”
“That was all. She said she’d see me at church.” Grandma was quiet. “She sounded tired, Amy.”
I did not know what to say to that, so I said, “We’ll be out Saturday morning.”
The first Saturday in November was cold and bright, the kind of morning where your breath shows until about ten and then the sun gets serious. We pulled into the drive at eight with a truck bed full of five-gallon buckets, three roller pickers, a stack of mesh sacks from the feed store, and two kids who had already asked twice when lunch was.
Grandma was waiting on the porch in her red wool coat with her crocheted blanket over one arm. She had a folding lawn chair leaned against the porch rail, the old webbed kind with aluminum arms.
“Put that under the Stuart by the windmill,” she told Travis, pointing. “That one drops first. It always has.”