Grandma Came Home to Pine Fork

The Sundays

At first she was gracious about it. Grandma has always been gracious. She said Lowell meant well, and his house had a walk-in shower, and it was only until her wrist healed.

Her wrist healed in May. She did not come home.

Every Sunday she asked him to drive her to Pine Fork. Every Sunday he gave her the same answer. It was too far. What if she fell on that gravel lot?

“You’ll go to church down here, Mama,” he would say. “There’s a fine church right up the road.”

She went to that church twice. It was a big brick building with a parking lot like a grocery store and screens on the walls instead of hymn boards. Everybody was kind to her and nobody knew her name.

After the second time, she quit asking Lowell. She would sit in his front room on Sunday mornings in her church dress, with her pocketbook in her lap, and listen to a preacher on the radio.

Then on Saturday nights she would call me.

I visited her when I could. On my days off in June and July I drove the four hours down and the four hours back.

But I watched her. I am a nurse and I watch people for a living. I watched my grandmother get smaller in that house, not in her body but in her face.

She stopped wearing her earrings. She stopped asking what was going on at home. She would sit at his kitchen window and look out at a wooden privacy fence and a neighbor’s trampoline.

In July I sat on Lowell’s back porch with him while she napped. It was a hot, bright afternoon. A lawn crew was running mowers two houses down, and we had to talk over them.

“She’s not doing well here,” I said.

“She’s safe here,” he said.

“Those aren’t the same thing, Uncle Lowell.”

He looked at me then, a long look. Lowell is 64. He has big hands scarred up from thirty years of ductwork.

“Ivy,” he said, “I am not going to get a phone call that she’s laying on the ground somewhere and I’m hours away. I am not doing that again. I’m not.”

“She’s not asking to move home,” I said. “She’s asking to go to church.”

“It’s too far.”

“It’s one day.”

“It’s too far,” he said again, and got up and went in the house, and that was the end of it.

The Call I Made

Driving home that evening I thought about it the whole four hours. I am not a person who likes to make trouble in a family.

I could have called a lawyer. Grandma would never have forgiven me for hiring somebody against her own son.

I could have kept asking Lowell nicely. I had done that since April. Asking him only gave him another chance to say no for her, and he always took it.

So I decided I was done asking. Grandma was 91, not 9. She had a sound mind and a mended wrist, and she had asked me herself, more than once, in a whisper.

That week I called my cousin Jesse. Jesse is Lowell’s son, thirty years old. He moved back up to Alleghany County after high school, works as a lineman for the power cooperative, and runs a few head of cattle on Granddaddy’s old place.

Jesse is quiet like Daddy was. He climbs poles in ice storms for a living and he does not waste words.

“Daddy’s scared,” Jesse said, when I told him what I meant to do. “He’s not mean. He’s just scared.”

“I know it.”

“But he’s wrong,” Jesse said. “You go get her. I’ll help the men set up tables. I’ll see she has a chair.”

On the Friday before Homecoming, I called Lowell at seven in the evening, after his supper. I had written down what I was going to say on the back of an envelope so I would not lose my nerve.

“Uncle Lowell, I’m coming to get Grandma for Homecoming on Sunday. I’ll pick her up at five in the morning. I’ll have her back to your door by eight that night. I’ll be with her every minute.”

There was a silence on the line so long I thought the call had dropped.

“You’re not taking her,” he said.

“I’m not asking you, Uncle Lowell. I’m telling you when, so you won’t worry.”

“Ivy, I said no.”

“She’s your mama,” I said, “but she’s not your child. She asked me. I’ll see you Sunday at five.”

He hung up on me. I sat there holding the envelope with my hands shaking, and then I called Grandma and told her to lay out her navy dress.