The Reunion Grandma Paid For

Jace

Jace kept coming, though.

Kyle would drop him off Saturdays sometimes when he was working, and Grandma would put him at the kitchen table with a thousand-piece puzzle of a covered bridge. They worked on that puzzle from October clear into January.

One Saturday in November I came by to bring her groceries and found the two of them at the table with their heads together. Jace was nine and missing a front tooth, and he was holding up a piece of sky to the light.

“Grandma Pauline,” he said. “Is Grandpa Boyd in trouble?”

I stopped in the doorway with the bags.

Grandma kept looking at the puzzle. She fit a piece of the bridge into place and pressed it down with her thumb.

“No, sweetheart,” she said. “Your grandpa isn’t in trouble with anybody. He’s just sad, and a little ashamed. When grown men are ashamed they go quiet for a while.”

“Like when I broke your lamp?”

“Just like when you broke my lamp.” She smiled at him. “And what did I tell you then?”

Jace thought about it. “That it was just a lamp. And you’d rather have me.”

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s what I’d tell him, too.”

Jace nodded slowly, very serious. Then he found the piece of sky he had been looking for and fit it in, and he grinned with his missing tooth, and Grandma laughed out loud.

I set the groceries down on the counter very quietly. I didn’t want either of them to see my face.

Winter

“I filled the tank in December,” she told me proudly. “All the way full. I haven’t done that since your grandpa.”

Boyd’s pickup was gone by February. The new one, the one he had been three payments behind on. He sold it to a man in Clinton before the bank could take it back, and he started driving his old 2006 Chevy with the cracked windshield again.

Everybody in town saw it. Nobody said anything to his face. That is how things are done here. But it was a real thing, and it cost him. He had been proud of that pickup.

The Porch Step

In May, I drove out on a Wednesday morning, early, to take Grandma to her eye appointment in Weatherford.

Her front porch step had been loose all spring. The bottom board had rotted through at one end, and it rocked when you put your weight on it. I had been after her to let me call somebody, and she kept saying she would get around to it.

That morning, the step was fixed. A brand new treated board, still pale and smelling of sawdust, set in with deck screws, nice and level. Somebody had even swept the sawdust off into the flower bed.

“Who fixed your step, Grandma?”

She came out the door with her purse on her arm and looked down at it like she had never seen it before.

“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “I heard a drill about six o’clock this morning. By the time I got my housecoat on, whoever it was had gone.”

I looked down the drive. There were tire tracks in the dew on the grass, the wide tracks of a heavy truck.

Grandma stepped down onto the new board and it held her fine. She stood there a second with her hand on the rail.

“Well,” she said softly. “He always was good with his hands.”