Two Hams for Grandma’s Wake

If I shut the door on a grieving family the week of a funeral, I would be the man who did that, for good, at every Christmas and every graduation for the rest of Owen’s life.

And he would grow up feeling it in every room his mother’s side was in.

Leaving wasn’t right either. I pictured Owen and me killing time in a booth at the supper club out on the highway, like renters asked to step out so the real owners could come in.

And something else bothered me, worse than all of that. Ida would have hated it.

She hated a fuss, but she hated an empty kitchen more. She used to say a house is only a house until somebody’s at the stove.

I went and stood in front of the pantry door. I didn’t turn on the light. I didn’t need to. I knew every mark on it by heart.

The day we signed the papers, eight years ago, Ida had walked me through the kitchen on her cane.

She had stopped at the pantry and put her hand flat on the old wood door, on the pencil lines running up the inside of the frame.

“Glen and Joanie,” she said. “Every Fourth of July, from the time they could stand. I did it with Walt’s carpenter pencil.”

She looked at me with those pale blue eyes of hers. “Don’t you paint this door, Nicholas. Promise me.”

I promised. I had kept that promise through two coats of paint on every other wall in that kitchen. I’d taped around that frame with painter’s tape and a steady hand.

Amber used to tease me about it. Owen’s marks went on his bedroom closet instead, because the pantry door felt like Ida’s.

So I stood there in the dark, with my hand where Ida’s hand had been, and I made up my mind.

In the morning I called Amber. She answered on the first ring, which told me she had been expecting it.

Her voice was rough, the way it gets when she’s been crying and doesn’t want you to know.

“He called you,” she said.

“He called me,” I said. “Clear out by ten, gone till six, leave the key under the mat.”

She let out a long breath. “Nick, I told him to ask you. I told him to ask nicely. He was with her when she went, you know. He was holding her hand. He hasn’t slept. He’s not himself.”

“I know he isn’t,” I said. “I’m not mad at him, Amber. Not really. But I’m not leaving my own house like a stranger, and I’m not sending Owen to sit in a booth somewhere while his family says goodbye to his great-grandma.”

“So what are you going to do?” she asked, and I could hear she was bracing for it.

“Tell Glen the door will be open,” I said. “Tell him I’ll be here. And tell him I’ll feed everybody. How many are you thinking?”

There was a long pause on the line. “Sixty, maybe,” she said finally.

“Grandma’s sisters and all their kids and grandkids, and the church people, and the neighbors from back when. You don’t have to do that, Nick.”

“I know I don’t,” I said. “I want to. She was my family too, for a while. And I want her lunch in her kitchen with somebody at the stove. That’s what she’d want.”

Amber was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, in a small voice I hadn’t heard since before Owen was born, “She would. She would want that.” And she said she would tell Glen.