The Half Mile I Swam Beside Grandma

Next Year

On the beach, after a while, Arne lifted his head and looked out across the water toward our dock. You could just see it from there, a little gray stripe under the pines with the green boathouse behind it.

“Mom,” he said. “Next year. Could I swim it with you? With you and Britt?”

Grandma looked at him for a long time.

“You’ve never swum farther than the raft,” she said.

“I’ve got a year.”

“You’ll have to learn breaststroke. I’m not waiting on you to splash around doing the crawl.”

“Britt can teach me.”

I said I could. I said I would start him at the Rice Lake pool in January, twice a week, and that he would hate every minute of it. He laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh in a long time, maybe years.

“And you’ll need your own cap,” Grandma said. “You’re not borrowing mine.”

The Cap

Then she did the thing I will remember when I am eighty-two myself.

She reached up and peeled the white cap off her head. Her silver hair was flattened and damp underneath. She wrung the cap out with both hands, twisting it the way she used to wring dish rags at the sink, and the lake water ran out of it and down her wrists.

Then she reached over and put it on my head.

It was still warm from her. It smelled like rubber and lake and her shampoo. She tugged it down over my ears with both hands, carefully, the way she used to put my winter hats on when I was four and could not hold still.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s had a good swim. It was waiting long enough.”

I could not say anything. I just sat on the sand with my grandmother’s cap on my head and my grandpa’s square printing in my mind, “Ingrid, spare, 2002,” and cried like a little girl in front of a beach full of strangers.

Arne put his arm around me. He did not say anything either. He did not need to.

Home

We rode back around the lake in Arne’s truck, all four of us squeezed in, Grandma in the middle in her towel with her feet up on the hump. The red kayak rode in the bed with the tow line coiled on top.

At the cabin, the family came down the drive to meet us. The kids had made a sign out of a paper plate that said 65 in ketchup. Somebody had saved Grandma a brat and a scoop of potato salad, and a cold root beer, because that is what Grandpa always bought her at the beach stand.

That night the fireworks went up over the lake from the city park, the way they do every Fourth. The whole family sat on the dock and on the lawn in blankets. Grandma had a chair at the end of the dock, right where Arne had stood that noon and said his worst thing.

He sat on the boards beside her chair. Halfway through the fireworks, I saw him take off his shoes and his socks and put his feet down into the water, all the way to the ankle. First time in twenty-three years.

Grandma did not say a word about it. She just reached down and rested her hand on top of his head, and they watched the sky together.