The Baby News Grandma Posted For Us

I put my hand over my heart, because it felt like it was going to come out of me, and I laughed and said, “Grandma, you did it perfect.”

“Then I’m sending it,” she said. And she pressed the arrow, grinning like a girl.

The first answer came in eleven seconds. I know because Grady was watching the clock on the stove.

It was Aunt Joan, Grady’s dad’s sister in Anamosa, who keeps her phone in her apron. She wrote: Oh my goodness. Grady and Tessa! Praise the Lord!

Then Jenny. Then Uncle Ron, who wrote just: Well I’ll be. Congratulations kids. Then a cousin in Waterloo, then two in Cedar Rapids, then somebody’s husband who had never posted in the chat at all.

Grandma’s phone started buzzing so steadily it walked itself across the oilcloth. She had the sound turned up all the way, because she does not hear the little ding otherwise, and it dinged and dinged.

“Lord have mercy,” she said. “Make it quit.”

“It’s not going to quit, Grandma,” Grady said. He was grinning now, finally. “You started it.”

Grady’s phone was going too, and mine. Aunt Joan called Grady and cried on the phone. My mom called from Dubuque, laughing, because Jenny had already found her on Facebook.

Grandma got up and called Steve on the house phone, the old one on the wall by the pantry. We could hear her half of it.

“Steven. It’s your mother. Are you sitting down? No, nobody died. Sit down anyway.” A long pause. “That’s right. August.” Another pause. “Well, you can cry, I did.”

By the time the coffee was cold, there were thirty-one answers in the chat. By the time the sun started going down behind the machine shed, every person in that chat had answered.

Every person but one.

I did not say anything about it. Neither did Grady. But Grandma had her glasses on and her phone up close, reading every single one out loud to us, and she noticed. Grandma Willie notices everything.

Then Aunt Joan wrote, right there in front of the whole family: Kirk, you’re going to be an uncle! Did you know?

I watched Grady’s face when he read that. He did not look happy about it. He looked like a man watching his brother walk out onto thin ice.

“Joan doesn’t mean anything,” Grandma said quietly. “She just types what she thinks.”

“I know,” Grady said.

It was almost five o’clock when Kirk’s name finally came up on the screen. Grandma read it out loud, and her voice was careful.

“Congratulations you two. Happy for you.”

That was all. No baby face. No exclamation point. Five words, two hours late, in front of forty people who had all answered inside of the first hour.

Grandma set the phone down face up on the table, right next to the ultrasound picture, and looked at it for a while.

“Something’s wrong with that boy,” she said. “And it isn’t the wedding.”

We drove home in the dark. The heater finally got going around Martelle. Grady drove with one hand and held my hand on the seat with the other, which he never does, because he says the truck pulls.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I keep thinking I ought to feel like we won something.”

“Do you?”

“No,” he said. “I feel like I’m fourteen and he’s standing in the driveway when Mom’s car pulls in from the hospital. And I don’t know why.”