The Reunion Grandma Paid For

September

The August check came to his post office box like always. Megan had warned us it might. The company was already processed for that month.

But in the first week of September, Grandma called me at the salon in the middle of a color.

“Leah,” she said. “Leah, it’s here.”

“What’s there?”

“I’m looking at it on the computer at the bank. Sherry pulled it up for me.” Her voice cracked a little. “Five hundred eighty-eight dollars and fourteen cents. From the gas company. To Pauline Tidwell.”

That same week, Boyd’s post office box didn’t get a check.

The Empty Chair

Boyd quit coming to Sunday dinner after that.

Grandma has fed whoever shows up after church every Sunday since 1968. Fried chicken or roast, green beans, rolls, a pie. Boyd and Pam always came. Kyle and his wife came when they could, and they always brought Jace.

The first Sunday in September, Boyd’s chair was empty. Grandma set his plate out anyway, with his fork on the right side the way he likes, and his glass of tea with no lemon.

She did it the next Sunday, and the one after that. Every single week.

“Grandma,” I said once, while we were drying dishes. “You don’t have to set his place.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. She didn’t look up from the gravy boat. “He’s my son. The day I stop setting his place is the day I’ve given up on him. And I’m not ever going to do that.”

She never asked him for a dime back. I want that understood. Not once, not in a letter or a phone call or a sideways remark at the grocery store. Six years of her money, more than forty thousand dollars by my figuring, and she let it go like it was a casserole dish she had lent somebody and wasn’t expecting back.

What she didn’t let go of was him.

Pam came by in October. Alone, with a sweet potato pie in a towel. She sat at Grandma’s table and couldn’t get through her coffee without crying.

“I didn’t know, Pauline,” she kept saying. “I swear to you I didn’t know. He told me it was overtime. He said they had him running extra loads.”

“I believe you, honey,” Grandma said. She held Pam’s hand on the oilcloth. “Eat some of your own pie. You look thin.”