The Payment Book Beside the Pie

What Brittany believed

Brittany did not like me from the start, and I never did figure out how to change it. I tried. I sent birthday cards.

I made her the lemon bars she liked. When she got married to Chad, I sewed the little lace sachets for every table at the reception, a hundred and twenty of them.

She thanked me in the polite way you thank a waitress. She called me Val, never anything warmer.

When Harper was born, the birth announcement she mailed out listed Grandpa Steve and Grandma Deb, and nobody else.

That was her right, and I never said a word. But it was Harper herself who started calling me Grandma Val, when she was about three.

Nobody taught her. She just decided. And Brittany let it stand, I think because she did not know how to tell a three-year-old no.

I knew some of what Deb said about me. Steve’s sister told me once, at a graduation party, after a couple of glasses of wine.

Deb said I was a gold digger. She said I had seen a man with a paid-down house and a fat retirement account and moved right in.

It was funny, in a terrible way. Because by then the retirement account was gone, the house was not paid down at all, and the only reason it stayed in the family was my paycheck from the hospital.

But I couldn’t say that. I had promised. And so for twelve years, when Brittany came over and looked around at the new kitchen counters, or the furnace we replaced, or the deck Steve built with the coffee can money, I watched her decide again that I was spending her father’s savings.

I could see her doing the arithmetic in her head. I could see it come out wrong every time. I let it come out wrong, because the right answer would have broken her father’s heart.