The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

Grandpa’s answer

Grandpa woke up around five and found us at the table with the photograph and the veil in its tissue paper. He looked at the veil for a long time, as best he could, turning his head.

“What are you two cooking up?” he asked.

I told him. Not a party. No cafe, no money, nothing that touched the account Glen was guarding. Just the steps. The steps were free. Anybody could stand on them. Mr. Pfaff, the custodian, swept them every Monday morning, and Saturday afternoon they belonged to whoever came by.

Grandpa didn’t say anything for a while. He looked at Grandma, holding the blue dress across her lap like it might get away.

“You want to do this, Marlys?” he asked her.

“I want to,” she said. “I want to stand up there with you one more time while I still know it’s you.”

Nobody said anything after that. Grandpa reached across the table and put his big hand over hers, the knuckles all swollen and scarred from sixty years of skinned hands on hydraulic lines and bearings and frozen bolts.

“Then we’ll go,” he said. He turned his head to find me. “But I won’t have you making Glen look bad, Kelsey. You hear me? He’s a good son. He’s doing the best he knows.”

“I won’t say a word about Glen,” I said. “Not one.”

And I didn’t. Not on Facebook, not at the courthouse, not to anybody in town. That was the deal.

One line on the town page

That night I took a picture of the old photo with my phone, on the kitchen counter under the light, and I posted it on the town Facebook page. The page is mostly lost dogs, road closures, and people asking if anybody knows a good furnace guy. Everybody in the county is on it.

I wrote one line. I rewrote it six times, and then I took most of it out.

Arnie and Marlys, married on these steps October 14, 1961. Same steps, 65 years later. 2 PM Saturday. Bring nothing.

The fourteenth fell on a Wednesday that year, and Grandpa does not do well with crowds on weekdays when he is tired, so I picked Saturday the seventeenth. They had been married on a Saturday. That seemed right enough.

I figured maybe twenty people. A few from church, a few from Grandpa’s coffee group at the gas station, maybe my teacher friends.

By the time I woke up there were two hundred comments.

Arnie fixed our baler in the rain in 1987 and wouldn’t take a dime for the second trip out.

Marlys kept the books at the creamery when my dad hauled milk. She caught a mistake that would have cost him a month’s check. She drove it out to the farm herself.

My mother was in the choir with Marlys for 40 years. We will be there.

Is this the Arnie from the Deere dealer? He taught me how to set a planter. Coming from Fargo.

By Thursday, more than nine hundred people had shared it. The weekly paper called me. The cafe called to ask if they should have extra pie, and I told them no, please, it isn’t a party, it’s just the steps, and the woman who owns it said, “Honey, I’m making extra pie.”

Uncle Glen did not call.