The Statement at Grandma’s Birthday Supper

Then she turned to the second page, and the third. The transfers. Twenty-four lines, two years, from my account to my brother’s, three hundred dollars each. Every memo line said the same word. Grandma.

She pushed her glasses up on her nose. She ran one finger down the page to the first line. And then she began to read out loud. Slowly.

“November first. Three hundred dollars. Grandma.”

“December first. Three hundred dollars. Grandma.”

Mark put his hand on my knee under the table.

She read every one. She did not skip any, and she did not speed up. She read them the way she reads the scripture on Sunday mornings when it is her turn, steady and plain, giving each one its due.

Jeremy had a bite of cake on his fork. He had picked it up before she started. He did not lift it, and he did not put it down. He just sat there holding it a few inches off the plate.

She read through the first year, and into the second. “January first. Three hundred dollars. Grandma.” That was this past January. My brother flinched. It was small, but I saw it, and so did Grandma, because her finger stopped on the line for a second before it moved on.

“February first. March first. April first.” She read through the summer. She read through September. She read the last line, the first of this October, only two weeks before, and then she took her finger off the page.

“Seven thousand two hundred dollars,” she said. “If I added it right.”

“You added it right,” I said quietly.

She took off her glasses and folded them, and set them on top of the pages.

The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on again under the floor. Then she turned to my brother. “Jeremy,” she said.

He put the fork down then. The bite of cake slid off it onto the plate. “Grandma,” he said. “I can explain.”

“I know you can,” she said. “You always could. You’re the best explainer in this family. When you were seven you explained to me how the cows got into my garden, and it took you twenty minutes, and you’d left the gate open the whole time.”

Mark almost smiled. Jeremy did not. “So I don’t need you to explain,” Grandma said. “I need you to tell me.”

Something went out of my brother then. His shoulders came down. He put both of his hands flat on the table on either side of his plate, and he looked at them instead of at any of us. “I lost my job,” he said. “In January.”

Nobody said anything, so he kept going. “Hauling cattle. For Kenny’s outfit. He sold the trucks after the first of the year, all of them, sold out to a big outfit from out by North Platte, and they had their own drivers.” He swallowed. “I was out of work on the eighth of January. I didn’t tell anybody.”

“Why not?” I said. It came out softer than I meant it to.

He looked at me for the first time. “Because I’m forty-four years old, Nic. Because I’ve got a house payment and a pickup payment and I’ve been divorced six years and I’ve never once asked anybody for anything. Because everybody in this town would know by noon.”

“So you used Grandma’s money,” I said.