The 1412 Birthday Cards for Grandma

I stopped. Grandma’s face had gone very still. “Go on,” she said.

“You kept me in at recess with the Sears catalog. You had me read the names of things. Saddle. Bucket. Overalls. You said a boy who could read a Sears catalog could read anything. By Christmas I was reading. By spring I was reading to my little sister.”

“I am eighty-six years old now. I live in Oregon. I read to my children every night of their lives because of you. They read to theirs. My great-grandson read me the newspaper last week. I wanted you to know that it started in your schoolhouse. I never told you. Thank you. Happy birthday. Harold.”

Grandma did not laugh at that one. She sat with her hands folded on the table and her face turned toward the window where the light was coming in. I could see her lips moving a little.

“Harold,” she said. “He had a cowlick in front. He wore his brother’s shoes. They were too big and he stuffed newspaper in the toes.”

“You remember him,” I said. “I remember all of them,” she said. “Read it again, honey. Slow.”

I read it again, slow. Then she asked me to put it in her cardigan pocket, and I did, and it stayed there for the rest of the month.

Word got around town the way word does. At the bank, people would lean across my counter with their deposit slips and say, “How many is she up to?” At the café, somebody wrote the number on the whiteboard where they put the pie of the day. The Lutheran pastor mentioned it in the bulletin, one line, under the prayer list.

Larry heard about it. Of course he did. He drinks coffee at the café every morning at six-thirty with the same five men he has drunk coffee with since 1980.

He did not say one word to me about it. He still came by on Sundays. He still sat with her for an hour after church. But he would come in the front door, not the back, so he would not have to walk through the kitchen.

Glenda called me on a Wednesday night. Glenda is seventy, quiet, a good cook and a better bookkeeper. She has done the books for the farm for forty-five years.

“How many is it?” she asked. “Eleven hundred and something,” I said. “Dennis has the number.” She was quiet a long time on the other end.

“He’s not a hard man, Tracy,” she said finally. “I know how it sounded.”

“I know he’s not,” I said. “He’s scared,” she said. “He sat up at the kitchen table last month with a pencil and her bank statement figuring how long her savings would last at the nursing home in the county seat. It’s eighty-nine hundred a month now. He figured it out to the month. He keeps the paper in his shirt pocket.”

I did not say anything. I had not known that. “Every time she forgets where she put something, he thinks this is it,” Glenda said. “Every time she sleeps in. He keeps saying she won’t know anybody. That’s not about her. That’s him. He’s already losing her and she’s still right there.”

“She knows everybody, Glenda,” I said. “I know,” Glenda said. “I think that’s what’s eating him.”

After I hung up I sat at my table a long time. Jeff came in and sat across from me and did not say anything, which is the best thing about Jeff.