The 1412 Birthday Cards for Grandma

I had been angry at Larry for three weeks. I think I had been doing exactly what he did, deciding who somebody was from the outside.

I did not call him. I did not know what I would say. I thought maybe he needed to come to the kitchen on his own.

The week before her birthday, the cards picked up again. Dennis said the post office in town had started getting cards with nothing but “Ione, the teacher” and the town name on them, and the postmaster just put them in Dennis’s case because there was only one Ione.

The kitchen started filling up. The table first. Then the counter. Then the chairs. Jeff brought over a laundry basket from our house for the overflow, and then that filled too.

I had started keeping them in the order they came, rubber-banded by day, because Grandma wanted to be able to go back to them.

“I want to hear them again when it’s quiet,” she said. “After all the fuss.”

Her birthday fell on a Saturday. I traded my Saturday morning window at the bank to the other teller, the first trade I had asked for since my dad’s funeral.

The morning was bright and cold and clear, the kind of February morning out here where the sun on the snow hurts your eyes and the frost stays at the corners of the kitchen window until almost noon.

I got there at eight. I helped her dress. She wanted her pink cardigan, the one with the brooch my grandfather gave her the year they got married. She has worn it on every birthday since 1949.

She wanted her good glasses too, the gold wire ones, even though they do not help her see much anymore.

“I want to look like I can see,” she said. “It’s my birthday.”

We sat at the table. There were envelopes everywhere, piled on the table and spilling out of the two mail tubs and the laundry basket. The whole kitchen smelled like paper and coffee.

I read to her for an hour. A card from a woman in Colorado who had been in her very first class. A card from the county commissioners, signed by all three. A card from a man who had become a large-animal vet and wrote that she had let him keep a baby skunk in the coal shed for a week in 1961.

Grandma laughed at the skunk until her eyes closed and her shoulders shook.

That was when Dennis knocked at the back door. He had another tub in both hands. He was smiling so wide I could see it before he got the door all the way open.

“Morning, Mrs. Lund,” he said. “Happy birthday.” “Dennis. Is that another one?” Grandma asked.

“It is.” He set it down on the floor by the other tub. Then he took one envelope out of his shirt pocket and set it down by itself, in front of her.

“That’s the last one sorted for this morning,” he said. “It makes one thousand four hundred and twelve.”

The kitchen was quiet. “Fourteen hundred and twelve,” Grandma said. “Yes, ma’am,” Dennis said. “I’ve been counting since the first one.”

She reached out and found Dennis’s hand on the table and held on to it for a second.

“Thank you for carrying them,” she said. “That’s a lot of walking.”