Uncle Glen said it at the end of my grandparents’ driveway, with his keys already in his hand and his back to the house, so Grandma could not hear him through the kitchen window. I have thought about that a lot since. Even then, he was protecting her.
“Kelsey, they won’t even remember it,” he said. “Mom doesn’t know what month it is. Last Tuesday she asked me if the school bus was coming. I’m not spending five hundred dollars on a party she’ll forget by supper.”
I had asked him for five hundred dollars of their own money. Not mine, not his. Theirs. Pie and coffee at the cafe on Main Street for whoever wanted to come, and the back room for two hours, on the Saturday closest to their 65th wedding anniversary.
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It was the last week of September. The soybeans were coming off around town, and you could smell the dust from the elevator all the way up our street. I had walked over after school, the way I do most days, because I live two blocks from them and I teach kindergarten, and by four o’clock I need to sit somewhere quiet.
“It’s their money,” I said. I kept my voice low, because I did not want Grandma looking out the window to see the two of us standing stiff in the driveway like that. “Grandpa worked forty years for it. Grandma kept books at the creamery for thirty-one. They can afford a piece of pie.”
Glen looked at me the way he used to look at me when I was fifteen and he was teaching me to drive stick in his old pickup on the gravel roads south of town. Patient, tired, and absolutely certain he was right.
“Five hundred dollars is two days at Bethany,” he said. “Do you know what memory care costs in this county? Eight thousand a month, if they have a bed. She is going to need it, Kelsey. Not this year, maybe. But it’s coming, and every dollar I don’t spend now is a day she gets to stay somewhere decent later.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I still don’t, really. He was not wrong about the money. He was wrong about something else, and it took me a while to work out what.
“They’ll remember,” I said.
“Dad will,” Glen said. “Mom won’t. And I’m the one who’ll have to explain it to her afterward, when she asks why all those people were hugging her.” He opened his truck door. “The answer’s no. I’m sorry. I love you, kid.”
He meant that last part. That was the hard thing about Uncle Glen. He always meant it.