The Story Hour In My Front Room

The ones with no grandmother

There is a thing I noticed by about the sixth or seventh Saturday, and it is the tender part, so I will go slow with it.

A good many of these children did not have a grandmother anywhere near.

This is how it is now. The young families out here, half of them, their own people are two states away or passed on or not the kind you leave a child with. Steph’s mother was in Oregon. The Holcomb girl’s grandmother had died the year before. Micah’s grandmother, Kayla’s mother, had moved to Texas for the work.

And children know. They know when there is a lap missing.

I started keeping a basket by the door with little things in it. A comb, because one little girl came every week with her hair not done and I asked her mother could I, and her mother’s face did something when I asked, and after that I did the child’s hair before every story. Band-aids with the cartoons on them. A spare pair of socks in three sizes because the barefoot boy from down 9 was barefoot in October.

Micah lost his first tooth on my rug. Right there, bit into an apple and there it was, and he held it up with his mouth bleeding and his eyes huge, not sure whether this was good or bad, and I said, “Well, look at you, that’s a big-boy tooth,” and I wrapped it in a tissue and told him to put it under his pillow, and his mother was at work and his daddy was somewhere, and I was the one who got to tell him about the tooth fairy.

I went in my bedroom after and sat on the edge of my bed a minute.

Not sad. I want to be clear it was not sad. It was the other thing, the thing that is so full it has to come out your eyes because there is no other door for it. Harold would have known the word for it. I just sat there and let it be full.

There was a little girl named Ellie who came all that fall, four years old, serious as a judge, who had decided early on that she was in charge of the apple plate. She would not eat until she had passed it to every other child first, going around the rug slow and careful, holding it in both hands like the collection plate, and only then would she take the last slice for herself.

Her mama told me, quiet one day, that Ellie’s own grandmother had passed that spring and that Ellie had been at the hospital for the end of it, too young to be there and nowhere else to put her, and had come out of it certain that her job in this world was to take care of the old people.