The Saturday Grandma Got Her Curls Back

Grandma fell in her own kitchen in town the second week of July. She was reaching for a coffee can of buttons on the top shelf, she said, and the step stool moved. She broke her left wrist and cracked her pelvis, and she spent three weeks at the hospital in Marshfield and then in rehab.

She was on pain medicine that made her foggy for a while. There were forms to sign and bills to pay, and her house in town had three steps up to the door and a bathroom on the second floor.

Ron, Joel’s dad, is her only son. He drives over the road, mostly paper rolls out of the mills along the Wisconsin River, down to Kansas City and Memphis and back. He is gone two and three weeks at a stretch and has been since Joel was in diapers.

So it was Darla who said, “She’ll come to us.” Darla who cleared out her sewing room, Darla who drove to the Social Security office with the paperwork and came home as Grandma’s representative payee.

I want to be fair about that. Nobody else offered. Joel and I were working, and our spare room was full of boxes, and I told myself Grandma would rather be with her son’s wife than with her grandson’s.

A payee is the person Social Security trusts to receive somebody’s check and spend it on what they need. Grandma’s check is $1,640 a month. Darla kept $1,200 of it for room and board, and put the rest in an envelope for Grandma’s prescriptions and her church offering.

I looked it up later, because I am the kind of person who looks things up. A payee is allowed to charge reasonable room and board. Twelve hundred dollars for a back bedroom in Wood County is a lot. It is not against the law.

And Grandma was not starving. She was not locked in. She was fed, warm and safe, and she had her pills on time. A skipped shampoo is not something you call the sheriff about. It was our family’s shame, and it was our family’s to fix.

That is what I kept telling myself on County Trunk A. It was ours to fix, and I knew one thing better than anyone in that family: how to wash a woman’s hair.

Joel got home after dark. He is the foreman on a county road crew, and November means he is half living at the highway shop, getting plows hung and wings checked before the first real snow.

He came in smelling like diesel and cold air and found me at the kitchen table with a cup of tea I had not touched.

“What happened?” he said. He knows my face.

I told him. All of it. The hand on her head, the blinds, the cold she made up for the pastor’s wife. The twelve hundred dollars. I’m not her maid.

Joel stood with his jacket half off. He is a big quiet man, and he gets quieter when he is angry, which is how I knew how angry he was.

“I’m calling Mom,” he said.

“Wait,” I said.

“Nikki, that’s my grandma.”

“I know whose grandma she is. Wait.” I took his hand. “If you call your mother tonight, she’ll be ashamed, and when Darla is ashamed she digs in. Grandma will be in the middle of it. Grandma asked me not to make a fuss.”

“So we do nothing?”

“No,” I said. “I do her hair. Saturday. And then we see.”

He sat down across from me with his jacket still on one arm. He was quiet for a long time.