The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

Because she was. The whole town had come to watch, and what they were watching was not a thief. They did not know about the empty tins. All they knew was that Hazel was back where she belonged, and they loved her, and their love was pouring in all day long in six-dollar bills, right past the box, right into her hand.

I think that was worse for Janet than any sheriff would have been. A sheriff she could have argued with. She could have told a sheriff about the price of oil. There was no arguing with Delbert Hays taking off his cap.

Around eleven o’clock the fiddle stage struck up and the lunch crowd hit and we could not fry them fast enough. Scott had his sleeves rolled and sweat running down his temple and he never slowed down. He poured the batter in a spiral through the pitcher, let it set up golden, flipped each cake once, drained it, and passed it up, and I dusted and handed them out, and Grandma made change out of her coffee can with one good hand faster than I could have with two.

At some point in the rush she looked up at me, flushed and shining, powdered sugar all down the front of her good blue blouse, and she laughed out loud. The first time I had heard her really laugh since March.

“Bethany,” she said. “I am working.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You surely are.”

The Cake She Dusted Herself

In the slow stretch after the lunch rush, when the sun had come around the oak and warmed Grandma’s side of the stand, she asked for one of her own.

“Fix me one,” she told Scott. “And hand me that sugar.”

Scott fried her a small one, drained it good, and set it on a paper plate on her counter. Then he handed her the big shaker of powdered sugar, and he did it without a word, which was the right thing to do, because Grandma did not want anybody doing it for her.

She picked up that shaker in her good hand. Her left arm was still no use to her, so she had to prop the plate against the cash box to hold it steady, and I saw her figure that out in about one second, the way she had figured out a hundred one-handed problems since the spring.

Then she dusted her own funnel cake, snowing the sugar down over it, more than anybody needed, a whole white drift of it, the way she had done it ten thousand times in forty years.

She tore off a piece with her good hand and she ate it, and she closed her eyes.