The Reunion Grandma Paid For

The Drive Home

We left a little before five. I walked her slowly out from under the pavilion, across the dry grass, with her hand around my wrist instead of my arm. She says holding an arm makes her feel like an invalid. Holding a wrist is just company.

Halfway across, she stopped. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the ground.

“Don’t you make a scene with him,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything, Grandma.”

“I know you didn’t. I saw your face.” She squeezed my wrist. “He’s worked that ground since he was fourteen years old. Your grandpa put him on the tractor the summer he turned fourteen and he never got off.”

“I know.”

“His truck payments are behind. Pam told me at Easter. Three payments, she said, and the hail took half his wheat in May.”

“I know that too.”

She started walking again. When we got to my car she let go of my wrist and stood there a second with one hand on the hot roof, catching her breath.

“Your grandpa and I bought those minerals in 1974,” she said. “With the dairy money. We sold forty head of Holsteins and bought a quarter section of minerals from the Hensley estate, and everybody at church thought we’d lost our minds.”

I opened her door. I turned the air on high and let it run while she lowered herself in, one hip at a time.

“How much, Grandma?” I finally asked. “Do you know how much the checks were?”

“Your grandpa used to say about six hundred a month, give or take, depending on gas prices.” She looked out her window. “After he passed, Boyd said it dropped to almost nothing. He said by the time the county took its taxes and the company took its cut, there wasn’t enough to bother with.”

“Did he show you a check? A statement? Anything?”

“Why would he show me?” she said. “He’s my son.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I drove. We passed the Church of Christ with its sign out front and the grain elevator and the Dollar General, and I turned onto her road and up her gravel drive.