The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

Twelve weeks. That was the rule we had made. At twelve weeks we would let ourselves believe it, and we would tell people.

My mom first, in Dubuque, because she is my mom. Then Kirk and Mallory, because Kirk was Grady’s only brother and the closest thing he had left to a parent besides his grandmother.

Their mother died when Grady was fourteen. Their dad, Steve, moved to Davenport a few years later, a good man but a quiet one who mostly asks about the weather.

It was Kirk who taught Grady to drive. Kirk who showed up at his high school wrestling meets. Kirk who stood up at our wedding and told a story about Grady hiding a stray cat in the hayloft for a whole summer.

That was the brother we had driven to Marion to tell. Not the one who turned our baby face down on the counter.

We were nearly to the Highway 151 ramp before Grady said anything.

“I’m not going home,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Grandma’s.”

I looked over at him. His jaw was set under his beard, but his hands were easy on the wheel. He had already made up his mind somewhere between the kitchen and the truck.

“We were telling her today anyway,” he said. “We were going to tell Kirk, then call Dad, then go out to Grandma’s. Nothing’s changed. We’re just skipping a stop.”

He was right. It was our baby and our news, Grandma was going to be told first anyway, and nobody in the Lindell family argues with Grandma Willie.

I want to be honest that I was not thinking about Kirk’s feelings right then. I was thinking about the bathroom floor and the calendars and the four trips to Iowa City, and I was angry in a way that made my hands cold.

But I did not say anything mean. I only said, “Okay.” And Grady took 151 northeast toward Monticello.

Grandma Willie lives on a gravel road eight miles outside of Monticello, in the same white farmhouse she moved into as a bride in 1961. Grady’s grandfather farmed corn and beans there until he passed eleven years ago.

The lane had drifted in some since the last snow, but somebody had plowed it, probably the neighbor. Grady pulled up by the back door, and we could see her moving around in the kitchen window.

She had the door open before we got up the steps. She was wearing her red plaid flannel shirt, the one she wears every winter, with her white hair in the soft curls she gets set every other Friday in town.

“Well, look what the cold blew in,” she said. “Get in here before you let all my heat out. I’ve got coffee on. Grady, wipe your feet.”

He wiped his feet. He is thirty-two years old and a licensed heating and cooling tech with his own work van, and he wiped his feet on her rug like he was nine.

Her kitchen smelled like coffee and cinnamon. The old radio on the refrigerator was playing the polka hour, low. Snow sat in the corners of the window over the table.

She poured three cups without asking. Grandma Willie believes coffee goes with every hour of the day and every kind of news, and she set the mugs down on the oilcloth with a little thump each.

“Now,” she said, sitting down next to me and folding her hands. “Something’s wrong or something’s right. You two never come out here on a Sunday afternoon without calling first.”