The 1412 Birthday Cards for Grandma

“Then the Arizona ones can send one,” I said. She thought about it with her hands folded on the table. I watched her think. She has always thought with her whole face, even now that she cannot see yours.

“All right,” she said. “But I’ll tell you what to say.” I got a pen.

“Say Ione Lund turns one hundred on Valentine’s Day,” she said. “Say she taught country school for thirty-one years. And say she would love a card.”

I wrote it down. “Not appreciate?” I asked. “Not appreciate,” she said. “Love. Appreciate is what you say about a casserole.”

I put it in the county paper for twelve dollars of my own money. It ran in the last week of January, three lines in the community column with her address on Third Street.

The woman at the paper, a nice woman named Kim, called me the day it ran.

“Your grandma taught my mother,” she said. “I’m sending it to the radio station too. They’ll read it on the swap shop.”

So on a Thursday morning in late January, the radio station out of the county seat read my grandmother’s three lines between a used hay rake and somebody’s lost blue heeler. Grandma heard it at her own kitchen table.

“Well,” she said. “Now I’m on the radio with a dog.” I did not tell Larry. I did not hide it from him either. It was in the paper, and Larry reads the paper.

The first week of February, nine cards came. I read them at noon. One from a woman in Sidney. One from the Methodist ladies. One from a man who had been in her school the year it got electricity, who wrote that he remembered her standing under the new bulb like it was a miracle.

Grandma made me read that one twice. The next day there were forty.

The day after that, Dennis knocked on the back door. Dennis has carried the route that covers the north end of town and runs out into the county for twenty-two years. He drives a right-hand-drive Jeep most of the year and his own four-wheel-drive pickup when the roads drift shut. He is in his fifties, steady, and knows every dog on his route by name.

He does not usually knock. He uses the box on the porch post. But that day the box would not hold it.

He stood at the back door in his light blue shirt, his breath smoking, holding a white plastic mail tub.

“Mrs. Lund,” he said, “I’ve got a little something for you.” Grandma, at the table, turned her face toward his voice. “Is that Dennis?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dennis said. “You’ve never brought me a tub before,” she said.

“You’ve never had a tub of mail before,” he said. “I think the whole county read the paper.”

He set it on the table. It was nearly full. Envelopes in every color, red and pink for Valentine’s and green and yellow and one orange one that was obviously a reused Thanksgiving card.

I looked at that tub and then at my grandmother, and I had to go stand by the sink for a minute.

From that day on, Dennis came to the back door almost every day. Some days one tub. Some days two.

He started keeping a count on a clipboard he kept on his dash. Nobody asked him to.

“Somebody ought to know the number,” he said. “Somebody’s going to ask.”