Two Hams for Grandma’s Wake

When Amber and I sat down at the kitchen table to divide things up two years ago, she did the math herself on the back of an envelope, and she pushed it across to me without arguing.

Ninety percent of that house had come out of my paycheck. I paid her nine thousand dollars for her share, refinanced in my own name, and kept the house so Owen could keep his room.

It was the one thing the two of us agreed on easily.

The divorce wasn’t anybody’s fault. We got married young and grew in two directions, and by the end we were polite to each other like strangers in a waiting room.

But Amber’s family never stopped calling it Grandma’s house. Not once in eight years.

They would say it right in front of me, while I was standing in the kitchen I had rewired, with the furnace I had installed humming under our feet.

Glen said it the most. He was Ida’s son, sixty-two years old, a big quiet man with a white mustache who had put in thirty-some years at the paper mill in Wisconsin Rapids.

He was never cruel to me. He just never looked at me like I belonged anywhere near his mother’s things.

It was my week with Owen. Amber and I traded Christmas every year, and this year I had him from the twenty-second through the twenty-sixth.

He was at the kitchen table building a Lego snowplow when I came in. He looked up, and his face changed, because seven-year-olds read you faster than anybody.

“Is it about Grandma Ida?” he asked. Amber had told him on the phone that morning.

He had cried then, she said, and then asked if Grandma Ida could still hear him if he talked to her.

“It’s about her funeral,” I said. I sat down across from him and picked up a Lego wheel so my hands would have something to do.

“It’s going to be on the day after Christmas. At St. Paul’s, where we go sometimes.”

“Can I go?” he asked. “I want to go. She was my best card partner.”

That was true. Every Sunday for two years, while Amber had him or I had him, one of us drove Owen to Riverview after church.

Ida had taught him cribbage at her little table by the window, counting out loud with him, fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is six.

She had given him her old cribbage board at Thanksgiving. It was a long piece of birch with the holes worn smooth, and Walt had made it in 1961.

Owen slept with it on his nightstand like it was a trophy.

“You can go,” I said. “We’ll go together.”

That night, after Owen was asleep, I stood in the dark kitchen with the furnace kicking on and off. It was seven below outside, and the windows had frost in the corners.

I could have said no to Glen. I want to be honest about that. It was my house.

My name was the only name on the deed, and nobody in that family could have made me hand over the key. Some men I know would have told Glen exactly where to have his lunch.

But I thought about what saying no would cost, and it wasn’t going to cost me. It was going to cost Owen.

Those were his people. Glen was his great-uncle. Marlene and Dot, Ida’s sisters, sent him a five-dollar bill in every birthday card.