“She barely knows anybody anymore,” my uncle Larry said. He said it standing in my grandmother’s kitchen with his coat still zipped and his truck still running in the drive.
“It’d be a room full of strangers and a sheet cake. Eight hundred dollars for that. No.”
He said it in a normal voice, the way you would say the price of diesel. He did not say it to hurt anybody. That was almost the worst part.
My grandmother was in her chair in the front room, twelve feet away, with the radio turned low. Her eyes went years ago. Her ears never did.
I was at the counter putting her lunch dishes in the drainer. I saw her hands stop moving on the arm of the chair. Then they started again, slow, smoothing the afghan over her knees like nothing had happened.
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“Larry,” I said. “She can hear you.”
He looked toward the doorway. For one second I saw something cross his face that was not stubbornness. Then it was gone, and he pulled on his gloves.
“I’m not saying it to be mean, Tracy. I’m saying it because somebody has to watch that account. You don’t see the numbers. I do.”
Then he went out the back door and drove back out to the farm, eight miles of gravel and a cattle guard, and I stood there holding a wet plate.
My name is Tracy Lund. I am forty-one years old, and I work as a teller at the bank in our town, which has nine hundred people, two churches, a grain elevator, a Legion hall and a café that closes at two.
My grandmother is Ione Lund. On February 14 she was going to turn one hundred years old.
She was born on Valentine’s Day in a farmhouse north of town during a winter her own mother used to call the long one. She got her teaching certificate out of the normal training class at the high school when she was eighteen.
Then she taught in a one-room country school out on the county road for thirty-one years. Eight grades, one stove, one teacher, and for a lot of those years, one outhouse and one pump.
She taught my dad and my uncle Larry in that schoolhouse. She taught half the ranch kids in the south end of the county. She used to say she taught their children too, before the district closed the school and bused everybody into town.
Her hearing is sharp as a tack. Her eyesight is mostly gone, macular degeneration, both eyes. She can see light and the shape of a person in a doorway. She cannot read a word.
That is why I read to her. I have been doing it every day for four years.
The bank lets me take my lunch at noon. I walk the two blocks to her little house on Third Street, heat up whatever Glenda or the church sent over, and read her the county paper while she eats.
She likes the obituaries first, then the court news, then the letters to the editor, which she argues with out loud.
My dad, Jim, was her younger son. He died ten years ago of a heart attack in the shop at the elevator. After that, it was Larry who handled her affairs, because he was the oldest and because that was how she wanted it.
Six years ago she signed a power of attorney naming him. She did it with a clear head at the lawyer’s office in the county seat, and I was glad of it then. Somebody needed to pay her property tax and keep the furnace serviced.