The Hayride Grandma Asked For

Grandma signs

I went down the hall to Grandma’s room with the form in my hand.

She was sitting in her chair by the window in her red knit cardigan, the one my mother made for her twenty years ago, with a library book open on her lap.

“Grandma,” I said, and held up the paper. “Bud wants to know if you’d like to take the team out. Saturday after next. If the weather holds.”

She looked at the paper for a long time. Then she looked at me.

Her eyes are pale blue, like a washed-out sky, and they filled up all at once, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“Gail said,” she started.

“I know what Gail said. Mr. Pleas says you get to decide for yourself. Your doctor still has to say yes, and the therapist has to watch you on the steps. But it’s your name on the line.”

She held out her hand for the pen. Her signature is still the same as it is on every birthday card I’ve ever gotten from her, big round letters that lean a little to the right.

Elnora M. Riggs. She pressed so hard she almost tore the paper.

Then she said, “Who else is going?”

The list

That afternoon Dorcas put a sign-up sheet on the bulletin board by the dining room, and by supper there were twenty-two names on it.

Some of them couldn’t climb two steps, and some had doctors who said no, and a few changed their minds. We ended up with fourteen.

Ambrose was on it. He’s eighty-eight, a retired grain elevator manager, and since his wife died in the spring he had barely said a word to anybody.

The aides told me they had never seen him sign up for anything. He printed his name in careful block capitals.

Glennis was on it, ninety-five years old, who taught fourth grade in a one-room school and still corrects everybody’s grammar.

Tilden was on it, ninety-four, who drove a truck in Korea and grew up with horses on his uncle’s farm across the state line in Ohio.

Nola was on it, and Theda, and Cleve, who ran the café downtown for forty years and still talks about the price of eggs.

A couple who had been married sixty-eight years and shared a room signed up together, one name under the other.

The doctor’s okays came in on the fax through the week. Grandma’s came on Wednesday.

Our physical therapist, a quiet young man named Rufus, had Grandma practice on a set of three wooden steps in the therapy room, holding the rail with one hand and his arm with the other.

“She’s steadier on those than she is on flat floor,” Rufus told me. “She wants it.”