The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

“There,” she said. “There it is.”

I had to turn around and look busy with the napkins, because I was not going to be able to talk for a minute.

A man I did not recognize had stopped at the window while she was eating. He was maybe fifty, in a clean shirt, and he had the look of somebody who had moved away and come back for the festival the way people do.

“Miss Hazel?” he said, uncertain. “You probably do not remember me.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him a while, taking the long road to his face.

“Tommy Reed,” she said. “You cried at the parade in 1991 because the fire truck was too loud, and I gave you a cake to hush you, and your mother was mortified.”

The man put his hand over his mouth. Then he laughed, and then he was not laughing.

“I have told that story my whole life,” he said. “I did not think you would remember.”

“I remember all my children,” Grandma said. “Every one that ever stood at this window.”

He bought three cakes, for a family that was not even there, and he put a twenty in her hand and would not take the change, and he walked off wiping his face.

Janet watched that too. She had gone very quiet by then. She was not making change at all anymore. She was just standing at the window with her hands still in front of her, watching her mother remember a crying boy from 1991.

The Lights Come On

The festival Saturday runs until dark, and by the time the sun got low and orange behind the courthouse, we were almost out of mix and clean out of the small cups and Grandma had sugar in her hair.

The crowd thinned the way it does at the end, families packing up strollers, teenagers drifting toward the fiddle stage, the quilt ladies carrying their frames back to their cars. The man who sharpens knives folded up his sign. Somebody cut the gospel radio and you could hear the generators and the crickets starting.

Grandma had not left her chair all day. I had asked her twice if she wanted to go home and rest and both times she had looked at me like I had suggested she leave her own child in a ditch. She had sat by that cash box from eight in the morning until the strings of lights came on over the square, and she had taken every dollar the town put in her hand, and the coffee can by her chair was so full I had emptied it twice into a paper sack under her blanket.