The Reunion Grandma Paid For

“It says you can handle your own mail,” I said. “That’s all it says.”

Her hand shook. Not much. Enough that the P in Pauline came out a little crooked. But she signed it all the way through and dated it, and Sherry pressed her stamp down hard on all four papers and wrote in her book.

“There’s a five dollar fee for each one, usually,” Sherry said, “but I’m not charging you a dime, Pauline. You taught my boy to read.”

Grandma taught first grade for thirty-one years. Half the town learned to read at her little table. It comes back around like that sometimes.

We walked next door to the post office and mailed it all certified, return receipt, to the gas company in Oklahoma City. It cost eleven dollars and some change. Grandma insisted on paying it herself out of her coin purse.

On the steps outside, she stood in the heat with the green receipt in her hand and looked at it for a while.

“Six years,” she said. “I’ve been buying my blood pressure pills a half bottle at a time. I turned the air off in August to save the electric.”

I didn’t say anything. I put my arm around her shoulders, and for once she let me.

Boyd’s Place

I wasn’t going to let him find out from an empty mailbox. That was the one thing I had decided on my own. Grandma hadn’t asked me to tell him, and I think part of her hoped I wouldn’t.

But I have never once gone behind anybody’s back, and I wasn’t going to start with my own uncle.

So after I dropped her off, I drove out to his place. Four miles of section road, the wheat stubble burnt pale on both sides, the dust boiling up behind me. His red water truck was parked by the shop, and he was underneath it with a grease gun.

He slid out on his back when he heard my car. He sat up and wiped his hands on a rag, and he didn’t get up.

“Leah,” he said.

“Uncle Boyd.” I stood there in the sun. “I came to tell you something to your face.”

He looked at me a long time. I think he already knew. I think he had known since the reunion, since Grandma’s voice came out so small at the end of that table.

“Go on, then,” he said.

“Grandma signed a letter this morning. At the bank, notarized. The gas company is going to send her checks straight to her account from now on. And she signed a paper ending the power of attorney.”

He didn’t move. A grasshopper landed on the toe of his boot and sat there.

“You think I stole from my own mother,” he said. It wasn’t loud. Boyd has never been loud. That was always what scared me about him when I was little.

“I think the checks go to her now,” I said.

“I have worked that ground since I was fourteen years old.” He said it to the rag in his hands. “Every year. Every harvest. Daddy used to stand at the end of the rows and say, ‘Son, all this is going to be yours someday.’ Every bit of it. That’s what he said.”

“I know he did.”

“So what came out from under it was mine, too. That’s how I always saw it.” He finally looked up at me. “You don’t know what it’s been like, Leah. The wheat was nothing this year. Hail in May. Diesel’s a fortune. I’m three payments behind on the pickup, and Pam doesn’t know the half of it.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Boyd. I am.”

“Are you.”

“I am. But Grandpa and Grandma bought those minerals with the dairy money. That was her forty cows too. Her hands milked them.” I swallowed. “And she’s been turning the air off in August.”

He looked away, out at the stubble.

“She isn’t asking for any of it back,” I said. “Not one dime. She isn’t calling anybody. She just wants her own checks in her own name.”

He stood up then, slowly, the way men his age do after lying on concrete. He put the grease gun on the bumper. He did not look at me again.

“You can go on home now,” he said.

So I did. In the rearview mirror I could see him standing by the truck with the rag still in his hand, not moving, the whole long way down the drive.