The Saturday Grandma Got Her Curls Back

I had to turn around and look at the oak cabinets for a minute.

When I turned back, Grandma had set the mirror face down on the table. She had turned her chair, slowly, with her good hand on the table edge, so she was looking straight at Darla.

“Darla,” she said.

“Yes, Mother.”

“You took me in when nobody else would. I know that. I’ll say it in front of Nikki so it’s said. Thank you.”

Darla’s mouth opened and nothing came out.

“And now I’m going to say the other thing,” Grandma said, “and I want you to let me finish.”

Darla nodded.

“I want to choose where I live,” Grandma said. “I’m ninety-one, and my wrist is mending, and my head is clear. I was foggy in July. I’m not foggy now. Nobody asked me in July. I’d like to be asked now.”

Her voice did not shake at all. Her hands did. Her voice did not.

“And I want my check to go to Ronnie. Not because you stole it. Because it’s my check, and I want my son to handle it, and I want to know where every dollar goes.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The furnace clicked off.

Darla stood there with the dish towel twisted in both hands. Her face did a lot of things at once.

“Where do you want to live, Mother?” she said finally.

Grandma looked at me.

I had not planned that. I had not asked Joel. I had a spare room full of Christmas boxes and an old exercise bike.

“I have a spare room,” I said. “It’s on the ground floor. There’s a step into the bathroom, but Joel can fix that in an afternoon.”

Grandma nodded once, like a woman closing a deal at the feed store.

“Then that’s where,” she said. “If Joel agrees. I won’t go where I’m not wanted.”

“He’ll agree,” I said. I did not even have to call him.

I did call him, of course. I called from the car in Darla’s driveway, with the heater running and the windshield fogged, and I told him everything, start to finish.

When I got to “There she is,” he did not say anything for a long time. I heard the sand truck idling behind him.

“Is the spare room okay?” I asked.

“Nikki,” he said, and his voice was thick. “I’ll have that step out of the bathroom by Wednesday.”

Then he called his father.

Ron was in a truck stop outside North Platte. Joel told him what his mother had said, word for word. Ron listened, Joel told me later, without one interruption.

Then Ron said, “I’m coming home.”

He called his dispatcher that night. He delivered his load in Omaha on Monday morning, turned down the next one, and deadheaded home empty, about eight hours on the road. He pulled into his own driveway Monday at suppertime, still in his flannel shirt.

He did not come to our house first. He went into his own kitchen, and he sat down with his wife.

I was not there for that. Darla told me about it weeks later, at my shop.

“He said, ‘I left you holding all of it,'” Darla told me. “He said, ‘That’s on me, not you. I should have been here, or I should have paid somebody to be here.’ Forty-one years married, and that was the first time Ron Brandt ever said that something was on him.”