The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

“My mom,” I said. “And we were going to call Steve tonight.”

“I’ll call your dad myself,” she said to Grady. “He doesn’t answer for you anyway. He answers for me.” Then she held up the phone. “Can I put it on the chat thing?”

I should explain about the chat thing.

The Lindell family group chat has forty people in it. Grady’s aunts and uncles, all the cousins, the cousins’ husbands and wives, a couple of second cousins in Cedar Falls nobody has seen since a reunion in 2014.

It is mostly casserole pictures, weather complaints, prayer requests, and whose turn it is to host Easter. When somebody has a baby or a grandkid makes the honor roll, it lights up like a pinball machine.

Grandma Willie was not in it until last Thanksgiving. Grady’s cousin Jenny sat down with her after pie and set it all up on the phone her kids had bought her, and showed her how to read the messages and how to answer.

Since then Grandma had posted exactly three times. Once to say happy birthday to Uncle Ron, once to say the roads were bad and stay home, and once, by accident, a picture of the inside of her purse.

“Grandma,” Grady said gently. “You want to post it? Yourself?”

“Well, you came to me,” she said. “Didn’t you? I’m the oldest one in it. I think I ought to get to say it. Unless you two would rather.”

I looked at Grady and he looked at me. And I thought about Kirk’s kitchen, the picture face down on the counter, and I thought: there is not one person in this family who will argue with this woman.

“We’d love that,” I said. “We would love that more than anything.”

She put her glasses back on. She held the phone up close to her face with both hands, the way she does, and she poked at it with one finger until she found the right place.

“Grady Lindell and Tessa,” she said out loud, slow, as she typed it. “Are going. To have. A baby. In August.”

It took her nearly two minutes to type that much. Grady leaned in behind the two of us to watch, one hand on the back of my chair. Nobody hurried her.

“I got told first,” she said, typing. “I am the happiest grandma in Jones County.” She stopped. “Is it County with a big C?”

“Big C,” I said. I could barely talk.

Then she frowned at the screen. “Jenny showed me where the little faces are. Where are the little faces?”

I reached over and touched the button for her. The little pictures came up, all the smiling faces and hearts and animals. She squinted at them for a long time, her finger hovering.

“I want the baby,” she said. “Is there a baby?”

I found the search for her and typed in baby, and there it was, a tiny baby face in a little pink blanket. I handed the phone back so she could do the last part herself.

She touched it once with her one finger. It went in at the end of her message. She looked at it, and then she looked at me, and she turned the phone a little so I could see.

“Did I do it right?” she asked.

I have thought about that moment more than almost any other in my life. An eighty-four-year-old woman in a red flannel shirt, who never learned a phone until she was eighty-three, asking me if she had done my baby’s announcement right.