The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

Grady looked at me. I slid the ultrasound picture across the table to her.

She did not pick it up right away. She looked at it lying there next to the coffee mugs. Then she reached for her glasses on the windowsill and put them on, slow, and picked it up with both hands.

For a long time she did not say anything at all. The radio played. The furnace ticked. Grady reached under the table and found my hand.

“Is this what I think it is?” she finally asked. Her voice had gone thin and high.

“Twelve weeks,” I said. “Due the first week of August.”

Grandma Willie set the little frame down very carefully, like it might break, and she put both of her hands over her face, and her shoulders started to shake.

I had never seen her cry. Not at Grandpa’s funeral, Grady told me later. Not when her sister passed. She was the one who made the ham sandwiches and the bars and got everybody else through.

She cried at that little kitchen table for about a minute, and then she wiped her face with a paper napkin and said, “Well. I thought I was going to have to wait for heaven to meet one of yours.”

That set me off, and then it set Grady off, though he will tell you it was the cold.

She asked all the things a grandmother asks. How I was feeling. Whether I was sick in the mornings. Whether I was eating. She got up and put a pan of cinnamon bars in front of me and told me to eat two.

She asked about the specialist, and I told her some of it. She already knew some. She had been praying for us for two years, it turned out, though she had never once asked a single question about it.

“I didn’t want to be one more person asking,” she said. “But I asked Him. Every night. You were right after the farm prices and right before your Uncle Ron’s knee.”

Grady laughed so hard he had to set his coffee down.

Then she looked at the two of us over her glasses and said, “Now tell me why you came in my door looking like somebody kicked your dog.”

I did not want to tell her. I want to be clear about that. It felt like tattling, and Kirk was her grandson too, the first one, the one she had held first.

But Grady told her. He did not dress it up and he did not make it worse. He just said we had gone to Kirk’s first, and Kirk asked us not to tell anybody until after the wedding, and we had said no.

Grandma Willie listened to the whole thing without moving. When he was done, she took her glasses off and folded them and set them down next to the ultrasound.

“Did he say why?” she asked.

“The wedding,” Grady said. “He doesn’t want it to take attention off the wedding.”

“Hm,” she said. Just that. She looked out the window at the snow for a while.

“I don’t want to start a war, Grandma,” I said. “I don’t. We’re not trying to embarrass him. We just are not going to hide this baby for five months for a party.”

“Nobody’s asking you to,” she said. Then she picked her phone up off the windowsill, where she keeps it next to a little dish of hairpins. “Now. Have you told anybody else?”