The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

The papers in the bread drawer

Here is something you should know before anything else, because people asked me later why I did not just go around him.

Two winters ago, Grandpa’s eyes went bad. Macular degeneration, the eye doctor in Willmar called it. He could still see the edges of things, could still find his coffee cup and his chair and Grandma, but he could not read a checkbook anymore, and he could not read the small print on the letters from Medicare.

That same winter, Grandma started leaving the burners on. Then she started putting the mail in the bread drawer. Then she called me at my classroom one morning to ask if I knew where her mother was, and her mother had been gone since 1979.

So the three of them went to the lawyer’s office over the hardware store, Grandpa and Grandma and Glen, and they signed the papers. Power of attorney for both of them, financial and health care. Glen is their only son, and he lives in town, and my mother is in Mesa, Arizona, two thousand miles away. It made sense. Everybody agreed it made sense.

It meant that every dollar of their savings, about a hundred and ninety thousand after a lifetime, was Glen’s to decide about. Legally it was his say. I knew that. I was not going to hire somebody to fight my own uncle in court over five hundred dollars, and I would have been ashamed to try.

I did ask Grandpa, though. I am not proud of how I asked. I sat down across from him at the kitchen table that evening and said, “Grandpa, you could just tell the bank you want five hundred dollars. It’s your account.”

He turned his head a little, the way he does now, to catch me in the corner of his eye where he can still see.

“I gave Glen my word I’d let him run it,” he said. “I don’t go around my own boy, Kelsey. Not over money, not over anything. He’s carrying more than you see.”

That was the end of that. Grandpa was a mechanic at the implement dealer for forty years, the man every farmer in the county called when a combine broke down in the middle of a field at nine o’clock at night. He did not change his mind once he’d set it. He’d just keep on talking in that same level voice until you understood he wasn’t going to.

“Is Glen mad at me?” Grandma asked from the sink.

She had been listening the whole time, I realized. She was rinsing the same coffee cup over and over, and her shoulders were up near her ears.

“No, Grandma,” I said. “Nobody’s mad at you.”

“Somebody’s mad,” she said. “I can always tell when somebody’s mad in my kitchen.”

My mother’s phone call

I called my mother that night from my apartment, with the window open and the cold coming in, because I was angry enough to need the air.

Mom listened to the whole thing. She has always been a good listener. She is a dental hygienist, and she says that’s what thirty years of people with their mouths open will do to you.

“He’s not wrong about the money,” she said, when I was finished.

“Mom.”

“I’m not saying he’s right, Kelse. I’m saying he’s not wrong about the money. I left. I got married and moved to Arizona and I call on Sundays. Glen stayed. He is the one who goes over there at seven every morning and counts out her pills into that little plastic box with the days of the week on it. Do you know what she asked him last month?”

I didn’t.

“She asked him which bank he was from,” my mother said. “Her own son. She thought he was a man from the bank, there to look at the furnace. He told me on the phone and then he didn’t say anything for a while, and I could hear him in his truck with the engine running, and I knew he was crying.”

I sat with that for a minute. The wind was moving the blinds.

“So he’s grieving,” I said.

“He’s grieving her while she’s still in the kitchen,” Mom said. “That’s the worst kind. You can’t even have a funeral. You just lose a little bit every morning and then you have to get up and go to work.”

“Then why won’t he let them have one good day?”

“Because to him it isn’t one good day,” she said. “To him it’s a day that’s already gone before it starts. He thinks she won’t keep it. So why spend the money?”

“And what do you think?”

My mother was quiet for a long time.

“I think Daddy will keep it for both of them,” she said. “He always has.”