The Granddaughter Who Fed the Card Club

The Locker

We drove it to the same locker plant that afternoon. Same girl at the counter, same pencil behind her ear. When she saw Paisley she set down her clipboard and smiled big.

“Second one?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Paisley said. “I want this one all ground. All of it. Into burger.” The girl raised an eyebrow. “All of it? No steaks? No roasts?”

“All of it,” Paisley said. “And I’m picking it up myself.” The girl wrote it down, then she underlined it twice. “Picked up by Paisley Halvorsen only,” she said, reading it back. “I’ll put that right on the ticket.”

It came to one hundred and forty dollars for processing. Paisley paid half and I paid half. She would not let me pay all of it.

On the drive home I finally asked her.

“Why all ground?” She was looking out the window at the bare trees going by.

“Because Grandpa’s card club meets Saturday at noon,” she said. “And you can’t grill a roast on a tailgate.”

The Plan

I nearly drove into the ditch.

“Paisley.”

“They ate my deer, Dad,” she said, very calm. “They didn’t even know it was mine. They think Grandpa shot it. I just want them to know whose it was. That’s all I want.”

“You want to go out there and make Grandpa feel bad?” She thought about that one a long time. She is a fair-minded kid. She gets it from her mother.

“No,” she said. “I want to feed them. I want to tell each one this is my deer. And if Grandpa feels bad, that’s his business. I won’t say one word about him.”

I drove another mile.

“Nine men,” I said. “How many burgers?”

“Forty,” she said. “Four apiece, plus some for whoever shows up. And Grandpa.”

“You’re going to give Grandpa a burger.”

“Of course I am,” she said, like I had asked the dumbest question in Iowa. “He’s my grandpa.”

Her Mother

My wife listened to the whole plan at the kitchen table that night with her hands wrapped around a coffee cup. I expected her to say no. It was her father. It was his yard. It was his friends.

Instead she was quiet a long while, and then she said, “Mom would have loved this.”

“You think?”

“She’d have been out there with an apron on,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “She always said Dad needed somebody to call his bluff, and she was the only one who ever did.”

“You want to come?” She shook her head. “No. If I come, it turns into me and Dad. This is hers. You go with her. Make sure she has enough buns.”