Two Hams for Grandma’s Wake
Glen didn’t say anything. But his jaw worked under the white mustache, and he set the coffee cup down on the porch rail very carefully, like it might break.
Then he went back in the house without a word, and I gave him a minute before I followed.
By four o’clock the light was going blue, and Owen had found the birch cribbage board in his grocery bag and was playing a game with Marlene at the end of the long table.
“Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair is six,” he said, moving his peg, and Marlene put her hand to her chest.
“That’s Ida’s count,” she said. “That’s exactly how Ida counted. Who taught you that, honey?”
“Grandma Ida,” Owen said. “Every Sunday. She said I was the best partner she ever had. Better than Grandpa Walt, and he made the board.”
Marlene had to excuse herself for a minute, and Dot came and took her place.
Amber had been in the kitchen with me since three, putting leftovers into containers and wiping down counters. She didn’t ask if I needed help.
She just took a dish towel and started, the way she used to in our first apartment, when we were twenty-five and didn’t know anything yet.
Around four-thirty Glen came into the kitchen again. Pam was behind him with his coat over her arm.
He walked past the sink, past Amber and me, and stood in front of the pantry door. Then he turned around.
“Where’s the boy measured?” he asked me.
It took me a second to understand him. “On his closet door,” I said. “Upstairs. Since he was one.”
Glen shook his head slowly. “He’s Joanie’s grandson,” he said. He tapped the frame, right next to the line that said Joanie 1978. “He belongs on this door. Get me a pencil.”
I got a pencil from the junk drawer, a stubby yellow one. Amber went to the dining room and came back with Owen by the hand.
He looked at all of us standing in the kitchen and asked if he was in trouble.
“No, son,” Glen said. His voice was rough. “Take your shoes off and stand right here. Back against the door. Stand up tall.”
Owen did. He pressed himself flat against the frame in his sock feet and stood up so straight his shoulders came up by his ears.
Glen put his big flat hand on top of Owen’s blond head and held the pencil against the wood.
His hand was shaking. I saw Pam see it. Glen drew the line anyway, slow and careful, and then wrote beside it in square, heavy letters: Owen 2026. Age 7.
Owen stepped away and turned around to look. His line was low on the frame, down near the bottom, below every one of Glen’s and every one of his grandmother Joanie’s. He looked at it for a long time.
“I’m the shortest,” he said.
“For now,” Glen said. “Joanie was the shortest too, once. Look there. 1966. She was four.” He pointed at the faded little line near the floor. “Everybody starts at the bottom of this door.”
Amber was crying without making a sound. Dot was crying in the doorway. I had to go rinse a pan that was already clean until I could trust my face.
At five, the last of them were leaving. The aunts were bundled up in the front hall, with their grandsons holding their elbows again, and Marlene had a foil packet of ham in her purse and a foil packet of lemon bars in her coat pocket.