The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

The Stroke and the Empty Tin

The stroke took Grandma’s left side and a little of her speech and none of the rest of her.

That is the part the doctors kept saying, and the part my aunt kept acting like she had not heard. “Her mind is sharp as it ever was,” the speech lady at the rehab place told us. “She just has to take the long road to the words now. Be patient and let her get there.”

Grandma got there every time. If you waited.

Janet did not always wait. Janet is my mother’s older sister, Grandma’s firstborn, and I will be honest and tell you I spent most of my life thinking she hung the moon. She is loud and funny and she shows up with a casserole before you know you are sick. When Grandma went down, Janet was the one who sat up nights at the hospital, and I loved her for it.

So when Janet said she would take over the stand for the spring events, none of us thought twice. There was the Dogwood thing in April, and the school carnival, and then the big one, the Strawberry Festival. Somebody had to run it or Grandma would lose her spot and forty years of good will.

“You rest, Mama,” Janet said, patting Grandma’s good hand. “I will keep your stand going till you are back on your feet.”

It was a kind thing to say. I believed every word of it.

The Dogwood festival came and went. Janet worked it alone, and afterward she came by Grandma’s house and set a coffee tin on the table and said, “Nothing left after costs, Mama, but we kept your name out there.”

I remember thinking that was strange. The Dogwood thing is small, but it is not nothing. Still, oil is high, and the booth fee went up, and I did not know Janet’s numbers. I let it go.

The school carnival, same thing. Empty tin. “Costs ate it up, but folks were glad to see Hazel’s banner.”

Then came the Strawberry Festival weekend.

Janet worked Friday evening by herself. Scott offered to help fry and she said she had a boy from her church doing it. That night she stopped by Grandma’s on her way home, and she set the gray cash box on the kitchen table, and she opened the dented lid, and inside there were a few singles and a roll of quarters.

“I swear, Mama, I do not know where it goes,” she said. “Oil, the mix, the booth fee, the propane. Nothing left after costs. But your people were so happy to see your sign up.”

I was sitting right there at the table. I had worked that stand for sixteen years. I knew what a Friday at the Strawberry Festival looked like. I knew what six dollars times a line that wraps past the quilt show looked like.

Nothing left was not what it looked like.

Grandma did not say anything. She looked at the few bills in the box, and she looked at her daughter, and she nodded slow.

But when Janet left, Grandma turned her chair toward me with her good hand on the wheel, and she said the only hard thing I ever heard her say about her own child.

“That girl,” she said, “is frying my name in her own grease.”