Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

And she gave five hundred to Dorcas. Dorcas tried to refuse it. Grandma left it in an envelope on the lottery counter with a note that said For the birthdays, and walked out before Dorcas could stop her.

The last five hundred she kept in the coin purse. She said it was for emergencies. I have never seen her spend a dollar of it.

Tanner did what she told him. He went to see his buddy’s father, a man who drives a milk truck, and he offered to fix the pickup himself. The father looked at him a long time and then said all right.

It took Tanner seven weekends and most of his evenings through April. He pulled the front end, bought a used grille and fender at a salvage yard near Monticello, and straightened the frame on his own boss’s time with permission. He primed it and painted it himself.

When it was done, it ran. The father drove it around the block and came back and shook his hand and said they were square.

The buddy stopped coming around the body shop. I don’t think anybody misses him.

Marlene did not speak to Tanner for about a week, except to tell him when supper was. Then one night she came by my house and sat on my porch steps in the last of the daylight and cried for a while.

“I raised him to be better than that,” she said.

“You did,” I said. “And he was better than that, in the end. In front of everybody.”

She thought about that. Then she nodded.

“He was, wasn’t he,” she said.

On Saturday morning, the day after that last Friday drawing, my phone rang at seven o’clock. It was Grandma.

“He called,” she said. “He checked it himself at the store first thing.”

“And?”

“Didn’t hit,” she said, and I could hear that she was smiling. “He told me the truth. Two dollars well spent.”

Rollie, I should tell you, now picks Grandma up for the eight o’clock Mass every Sunday in his truck. Nobody asked him to. He just started showing up in her driveway at a quarter till, with the heater running and the door open.

And Tanner comes by her house every Wednesday after work. He doesn’t bring her anything. He just sits at the kitchen table and drinks her coffee and lets her tell him about her three brothers, and about Gertie, and about the dairy farm up by the Minnesota line.

He knows all five birthdays now. She made him learn them.

Here is how it goes these days, and I have not missed a week since.

Every Wednesday I get off early from my visits. I pick Grandma up at her little white house. She comes down the walk with her cane and her purse and her rain bonnet, whether it is raining or not.

We drive out to the store on the highway. Dorcas sees us coming through the big front windows and has a fresh slip on the counter before we’re through the door.

And Grandma fills in the bubbles herself, slowly, saying the names under her breath, Gertie first, the way she always has.

Then she opens Gertie’s coin purse and takes out two dollar bills, folded in quarters, and lays them on the counter.

Grandma’s numbers went in on Wednesday, and she bought them herself.