The Friday I Signed Grandma Out

The Clipboard

The aide at the front desk slid the sign-out clipboard across the counter toward me. The ballpoint pen was already uncapped, still warm from the last hand that held it.

Friday mornings at Cedar Grove ran like clockwork. Ten o’clock, the pen came out. Ten o’clock, my cousin Deb signed her name on the line and took our grandmother out the glass doors for lunch.

Except it was nine forty, and I was the one standing at the desk. Grandma Ruth was already in the lobby behind me, in her good floral church dress, sitting in the vinyl chair with her purse on her knees.

She looked like a woman waiting for a bus she had been promised a long time ago.

“You’re early today, hon,” the aide said. Her name tag read Marcy. “Deb usually comes right at ten.”

“I know,” I said. “I wanted to beat her to it.”

Marcy looked at me, then at Grandma, then back at the clipboard. Something in my face must have told her this was not the usual Friday. She did not smile the way she normally did.

She just held the pen out a little farther.

I took it. I wrote my name, Alison, and the time. Under reason for outing I did not write lunch. Lunch was Deb’s word, and I was done borrowing Deb’s words.

I wrote the Dairy Bar.

Then I capped the pen and set it down and turned around. There was my grandmother, seventy-nine years old, smoothing the hem of that dress over her knees.

She looked up at me the way she used to look up from the stove when I came in off the school bus.

“Are we going now?” she asked.

“We’re going now,” I said. “Right now.”

What I did not say, standing there with my hand on the back of her chair, was that eleven Fridays had come and gone before this one. On every single one of them, a thing had happened that I was only now able to stop.