The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
“Well, you can’t eat them in the shell,” Grandma said. “Give me two.”
Macy dug two out of her pocket. Grandma took them in her right hand, one against the other, and closed her fingers around them. She squeezed once. There was a sharp little crack, and when she opened her hand, one shell was split clean down the side and the other was whole.
Macy stared at her. “How did you do that?”
“Your great-grandpa did it just like that,” Grandma said. “Every night after supper, the whole winter long. Two in one hand, crack, and he’d hand me the meat.” She looked down at her hand. “His hands were bigger. He could do it without even looking.”
She picked the meat out of the split shell with her thumbnail and gave it to Macy. Then she gave her the whole one back. “Your turn.”
Macy tried. She tried with two, and then with two different ones, and then she tried with both hands, which Grandma said was cheating. She squeezed until her face turned red and her palm had little ridges pressed into it.
“You have to put the points together,” Grandma told her. “Seam against seam. Let one do the work on the other.”
I stopped picking and just watched them. My grandmother in her red coat with the blanket over her knees, and my daughter beside her in a hooded sweatshirt with her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth, squeezing two pecans with everything she had.
On maybe the twentieth try, there was a crack.
Macy screamed. Grandma clapped her hands together and laughed out loud, a real laugh, the kind I had not heard from her since Grandpa died. She clapped like it was the county fair and Macy had just won the blue ribbon.
“There she is,” Grandma said. “There’s a Reese.”
Macy ate the pecan in two bites and dug in her pocket for two more.
I had to turn around and pick up pecans for a while so nobody saw my face.
By Saturday evening, we had 1,140 pounds in sacks, weighed on the old platform scale in Grandpa’s shed. Travis checked the sacks and said they were dry enough to sell. Dale’s station stayed open until six on Saturdays in season.
“I’m coming,” Grandma said, before anybody could ask.
“Grandma, it’s cold.”
“It’s my pecans. I’m coming.”
So Travis and Hunter loaded the sacks, and I helped Grandma into the front seat with her blanket, and we drove to town.
When it was our turn, Dale came out with a hand truck and helped Travis and Hunter roll the sacks onto the scale. He is a big, slow-moving man with reading glasses on a cord around his neck. He shook Travis’s hand and nodded at me, and then he saw Grandma in the front seat and his whole face changed.
“Miss Opal,” he said. “Well. I haven’t seen you out here since Walter.”
“I haven’t been out here since Walter,” Grandma said. “Help me out of this truck, Dale.”
He helped her out. He walked her into the office and pulled the only good chair over for her.
Then he did what buyers do. He weighed the load. He reached into three different sacks and pulled out a handful from each, and he cracked a sample on the little hand cracker at the counter and picked out the meats and weighed them on a small scale and looked at them under the light. Color, fill, how many were pops or stick-tights.