The Pecans Grandma Sold in Her Own Name
“Those are for the bazaar,” she said. “Pies and brittle. I haven’t made a pie for that bazaar since Walter passed. It’s about time.”
On Tuesday, I took Grandma to the bank. She deposited most of both checks in her savings and asked the teller for four hundred dollars in cash, in twenties.
“Grandma, you don’t need to carry that much.”
“I’m not carrying it. I’m counting it.”
That night, after supper, she sat at her kitchen table with the bank envelope and a pencil and the back of a church bulletin. Macy sat beside her on a stool. I washed the dishes and watched them.
Grandma counted the twenties out loud. She counted them twice. She wrote the total on the back of the bulletin in her neat, careful hand, and under it she wrote the amount in savings, and under that she wrote “Propane” and a number, and she drew a line under all of it.
“Well,” she said. “That will do.”
She put the bills back in the envelope and slid it into her pocketbook. Then she pushed herself up from the table and walked down the hall to the thermostat, slow, with one hand on the wall.
Macy and I followed her. We stood in the hall and watched her turn the brass dial with two fingers, past 62, past 65, all the way to 70. Somewhere under the house the furnace clicked and caught, and we heard the air start moving in the vents.
Grandma stood there a minute with her hand on the wall.
“Walter put that in,” she said. “Nineteen eighty-four.”
Then she unbuttoned her red wool coat, took it off, and hung it on the hook by the back door.
The bazaar at First Baptist is the Saturday after Thanksgiving every year. The ladies set up tables in the fellowship hall the night before, and the money goes to the Lottie Moon offering for missions. There are quilts and jams and casseroles in foil pans and a cake walk for the kids, and there used to be, when I was little, Opal Reese’s pecan pies.
Grandma baked all Thanksgiving week. I came out every evening, and Macy came with me, and we shelled pecans at the kitchen table while Grandma rolled crust and stirred syrup and bossed us from the stove instead of a lawn chair. The house was warm. The windows fogged up. It smelled the way it smelled when I was eight.
She made twelve pies and fourteen bags of brittle, tied with red yarn. Macy made the tags. They said “Opal’s Pecan” in purple marker, with a small drawing of a tree that looked a little like a broccoli.
On Saturday morning, the bazaar ladies gave Grandma the table by the coffee urn, which is the best table, and nobody argued. Joan Pickett, who has run the bazaar for twenty years, hugged her and said, “Opal, we’ve missed you something terrible.”
The pies were gone by ten. The brittle went slower, because most folks were there for pie, but it went. People stopped to visit with Grandma, and she sat in her folding chair behind the table and visited with every one of them, and I sat beside her and made change out of a cigar box.
By two o’clock, the hall was thinning out and there was one bag of brittle left on the table.
That was when I saw Sherry.