On Tuesday Ron drove his mother to the Social Security office. Grandma wore the lavender cardigan and her Sunday coat, and she had me come out first thing in the morning to brush out her set and give it a little lift.
You cannot just switch a payee on the telephone. The new payee has to apply, in person, and they want to hear from the person whose money it is when that person can speak for herself.
Lorraine could speak for herself. Ron told Joel she told the woman at the window, “My son Ronald is going to handle my check now. My daughter-in-law did it while I was laid up, and she did right by me, and now I want my son to do it.”
She did right by me. That is what she said, to a stranger, about Darla. I have thought about that a good deal since.
Darla did not fight it. She brought the envelope with the receipts for the prescriptions and the church offering to Ron that night, every one of them, written in her neat round hand. The twelve hundred a month stopped.
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That was the consequence, and it was a real one. Darla lost the money, and she lost the arrangement, and everybody at church knew by the next Sunday that Lorraine Brandt was moving to her grandson’s house. In a town our size, that is its own kind of reckoning.
But nobody said it in front of Darla. Grandma made sure of that. When Mrs. Hoffman asked her about it after the service, Grandma said, “Darla gave me four months of her life when I needed it. Now she gets to have her life back,” and that was the version that went around town.
Grandma moved into our spare room the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the day after the gun deer opener. Joel took the Christmas boxes to the garage and gave the exercise bike to his cousin, and he ripped out the little step into the bathroom and put in a grab bar on each side of the toilet and one in the shower.
Ron carried her recliner in from his truck. Darla brought the quilt from her bed, and a pan of bars, peanut butter scotcheroos, which I had told her were Grandma’s favorite.
“They’re too sweet,” Grandma said, and ate three.
She insisted on paying us. We said no. She said, “Then I’ll go back to Darla’s,” and she was not joking, so we settled on three hundred a month for groceries, which Ron writes out of her account on the first, and which I mostly spend on her coffee.
On Thanksgiving she sat at the head of our table with her set two days old and still holding. Ron said grace. Darla came and brought the green bean casserole and sat at Grandma’s right hand, and Grandma patted her arm twice during the meal.
The first Saturday in December, Joel drove Grandma to my shop on Main Street at eight in the morning, before the regulars.
I washed her hair at the shampoo bowl, the real one, with the chair that tips back on its own. Then I sat her in my second chair, the one I had kept empty for overflow.
She set her own curls that Saturday. Her left wrist was stronger by then, and she could get her hands up for a few minutes at a time if she rested her elbows on the arm of the chair. When she got tired, she handed me the clips and told me where.
By nine the regulars started coming in. Marge Kowalski for her color. Elaine from the bank for a cut. The two Schultz sisters, who come together every other week and argue the whole time.