The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

What Grandma said

Grandma lowered the photograph.

She did not look at Glen first. She turned and looked at Grandpa, beside her, in his navy funeral coat and the tie that was sixty-five years old.

She looked at him for a long moment, like she was making sure of something.

“October fourteenth,” she said. Clear as a bell, clear enough that the people on the front edge of the lawn heard it. “Arnie.”

Grandpa’s chin went. I watched it happen. Eighty-eight years old, a man who once set a broken finger himself in the shop and went back to work, and his chin just went.

“That’s right, Marlys,” he said. “That’s right. October fourteenth.”

Then Grandma turned and looked down at the bottom of the steps, at her son with field dust on his shirt.

And she smiled the way she smiles at me when I come in her kitchen door after school.

“There’s my boy,” she said.

That was all. Three words. She did not say his name. She did not need to.

Glen put his hand over his mouth.

Grandpa reached out his other hand, the one that wasn’t holding hers, and held it out down the steps toward his son.

“Come on up here, Glen,” he said. “Stand with us. We need a new picture, and it ought to have you in it.”

For a second I didn’t think Glen would move. Then he came up the steps, two at a time, the way he used to come up the porch steps when I was little, and he stood on the other side of his mother, and she let go of the photograph with one hand just long enough to take hold of his arm.

The man from the weekly paper took the picture. Then my principal took one. Then about three hundred phones went up across the lawn at once, and I stepped down onto the grass to get out of the way.

The cafe

Afterward, people came up the steps one at a time to shake Grandpa’s hand and hug Grandma. It took more than an hour. I stood one step below them the whole time.

Grandma did not get scared once. She did not know everybody’s name, and some of them she did, and to the ones she didn’t she said, “Well, thank you for coming, dear,” like a woman hosting her own party, which I suppose she was.

When it was finally thinning out, Glen walked down the steps and over to the woman from the cafe, who was still standing on the lawn in her apron.

“How much pie have you got?” he asked her.

She laughed. “Glen, I made extra. I’ve got twenty-six pies.”

“Then everybody who came gets pie and coffee,” Glen said, loud enough that people around him turned. “On me. Not on them. On me.”

I saw what he did there. He wasn’t spending their money. He was spending his own, from his own wallet, out of his own pocket, in front of the whole town. He wanted people to know it.

Most of the crowd walked down Main Street to the cafe. They ran out of pie by four-thirty. The owner sent her daughter to the grocery store bakery for more and they ran out of that too.

Glen sat at the counter and paid for every piece, and when the last of it was gone the total was a little over eleven hundred dollars, and he paid it with his own card and left a tip on top.