“Ione,” she said. “You’d better come to the door.” There were people on the front walk. On the porch and down the steps and out to the sidewalk, all bundled up in their good winter coats in the cold sunshine. Old men in caps. Old women with their hair done. Some of them with canes. One in a wheelchair, with a grandson pushing.
Forty of them. I counted later. Forty of her old students, from all over the south end of the county and as far as Sidney and North Platte.
Nobody had organized it. Somebody had called somebody at the café, and somebody else had called the Methodist prayer chain, and the word had just gone out that Ione was turning one hundred today, and they had all just come.
“Mrs. Lund,” said the woman in front, a heavy, grey-haired woman in a purple coat, “it’s Marian. From the blizzard. We heard it was your birthday.”
Grandma stood in her doorway in her pink cardigan, holding the frame, and turned her face toward the voices.
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“Marian,” she said. “Marian with the braids. Come in out of the cold. All of you.”
“There’s forty of us, Mrs. Lund,” somebody called from the walk. “Then you’ll have to come in shifts,” Grandma said. “Like recess.”
Everybody laughed. And that is when Larry came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Mom,” he said. “There’s no room in this house for forty people and fourteen hundred cards. Let’s go down to the Legion.”
He took his keys out of his pocket. He has been on the Legion post since he got out of the Army in 1976, and he keeps a key to the hall on his ring.
“I’ll open it up,” he said. “Glenda, call the grocery and see how many sheet cakes they’ve got. Tell them to put it on my account. Not hers. Mine.”
Glenda already had her phone out. “Larry,” I said. “I know,” he said to me, quiet, so the people on the walk would not hear. “I know. I should have done this a month ago. Let me do it now.”
So that is what we did. Larry drove down and turned the heat on in the Legion hall. Glenda and two of the Methodist ladies made four big percolators of coffee. The grocery had six sheet cakes, and Larry bought all six, and a man from the café showed up with two pies nobody had ordered.
Jeff loaded the two tubs and the laundry basket into the back of his pickup and drove the cards down, so Grandma could have them with her.
Larry walked his mother in on his arm. He did not let go of her once.
She sat at the head table in her pink cardigan with her brooch and her good glasses, and one by one, all forty of them came up to her chair and said their names. And one by one, she told them who they were.
“Second grade. You sat by the water pail.” “You were the one who brought the bull snake in your lunch pail.”
“You won the county spelling bee in 1963 on the word ‘conscientious.’ I nearly fainted.”
“Your mother made the best kolaches in the county. I still think about them.”
She did not miss one. Not one. Larry stood behind her chair the whole afternoon, and every time she named somebody right, I watched his face. He looked like a man finding out that something he had been sure he had lost was there the whole time.