The Week At The Gulf

Seven grandchildren

Rick and his wife Donna have three boys. My daughter Kim has three, two girls and a boy. Our middle son Jeff, who lives up in Minnesota and does not get down much, has the one little girl, Rosie, who is four and the baby of the whole bunch.

Seven. Seven grandchildren, between the three of them.

I keep their school pictures on the side of the refrigerator with magnets shaped like little ears of corn. I can tell you the gap in every one of their front teeth and which ones are grown back in.

Here is the thing I could not get out of my head after Rick left that Tuesday.

In the hour he sat at my table, turning his keys over, telling me about escrow and holdbacks and the timeline of my own death, he did not ask about a single one of those children.

Not his own three. Not his sister’s. Not little Rosie, who had been in the hospital in January with the croup so bad they kept her two nights, and he knew it, because I had called him from the waiting room and he had said he was in a meeting.

He talked about seven million dollars for forty minutes and he never said seven of their names.

I want to tell you I had some grand speech ready. I did not.

What I had was a bad night’s sleep and a lot of staring at the ceiling fan.

Sharon, my friend from church, she is the practical one, she would have told me to just call Rick up and say no, flat, and be done with it. One phone call. That is what a sensible woman does.

But I knew my son. If I called and said no, he would argue. He would bring Donna in. He would sit at my table again with his numbers and his timeline, and he would make it about whether I trusted him, whether I loved him, whether I was going to be difficult about money at my age.

He would turn it into a fight, and in a fight with Rick, somebody always ends up apologizing to him. Usually me.

I did not want a fight. A fight is hot and loud and it burns off by morning and nothing changes. I wanted something quiet that would still be true in the morning.

I just did not know yet what it was.