The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

The First One to See Her

The first regular to come up the line that Saturday was Delbert Hays.

Delbert is close to ninety and he has bought a funnel cake off Grandma every single year since, as he likes to say, Carter was still president. He wears the same seed-corn cap he has worn as long as I have been alive, and he walks with two canes now, and his granddaughter brings him in her van.

He got up to the window with his six dollars already crumpled in his fist, and then he saw the chair. He saw Grandma sitting in it in her blue blouse with her good hand on the counter.

He stopped cold. His granddaughter nearly ran the back of his heels with him stopping so quick.

Then Delbert Hays took off his seed-corn cap, which I have never in my life seen that man do outside of church, and he held it against his chest.

“Hazel,” he said. His voice broke right down the middle of her name. “You’re back. They told me you were poorly. They told me you might not.”

“I am not poorly,” Grandma said, slow and clear. “I am right here.”

Delbert reached across the little counter and he did not put his six dollars in the cash box. He put it right into Grandma’s good hand and folded her fingers over it with both of his old hands.

“No, sir,” he said to Janet, who had reached for the box. “No, sir. This goes to Hazel. This has always gone to Hazel.”

Then he leaned down over the counter, both canes hanging off his wrists, and he hugged Grandma’s neck, and I watched two old people hold onto each other and cry right there with the fryer popping and the powdered sugar hanging in the air.

“Welcome back, Hazel,” he said into her shoulder. “Lord, we missed you.”

Behind Delbert in line was a young mother I did not know with a baby on her hip. She had been watching the whole thing. When Delbert finally straightened up and moved along, she stepped to the window with tears standing in her own eyes, and she handed her money straight to Grandma too.

“My mama used to bring me here,” she said. “I wanted my baby to have one from you.”

Grandma pressed the bills into the money can with her good hand and she looked at that baby for a long moment, and she said, “You tell your mama Hazel said hello.”