Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

Then she looked up and saw us through the glass, me and Grandma at the lottery counter, and she smiled and waved, surprised and happy to see us.

Grandma let go of the counter and fixed her rain bonnet with both hands, tugging the ties straight under her chin.

“Don’t you make a scene in here,” she told me. “Do you hear me? Not in front of Rollie and everybody.”

“I won’t, Grandma,” I said.

And I didn’t. I didn’t have to.

Marlene hung up the nozzle and came in for her coffee, the way she does every morning. She came over to us first and kissed Grandma on the cheek.

“Well, look at you two, out so early. Did you go to the eight o’clock?”

“We did,” Grandma said.

“What are you doing at the lottery counter on a Thursday? Feeling lucky?”

Nobody answered her.

Dorcas didn’t say anything either. She just turned the screen a little more on its swivel, toward my sister, and put her finger on the line.

Marlene looked down at it. She is a nurse’s aide. She reads charts all day. It took her about three seconds.

I watched her read it. Wednesday. 7:12. Four thousand dollars. Then I watched her look at Grandma’s coin purse, still open in Grandma’s hand with the folded bills in it.

“That’s Mom’s numbers,” Marlene said slowly. She calls Grandma Mom sometimes, because Grandma raised half of her. “Those are Grandma’s numbers.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tanner told me Tuesday night that they didn’t hit. He was over at my house. He said it right in my kitchen.”

“He told Grandma the same thing,” I said.

Marlene stood there with her coffee cup empty in her hand. Her face went white, then red, then white again. I have seen my sister mad maybe four times in my life. This was not mad. This was something worse than mad.

“Dorcas,” she said. “Did he cash it?”

“He took it to Cedar Rapids,” Dorcas said gently. “That’s all I know, hon. They’d have paid him by check over there.”

Marlene set the empty cup down on the counter very carefully, like it might break.

She looked at Grandma. Grandma looked right back at her.

“Don’t you let anybody call the law on him,” Grandma said. “I mean it, Marlene. He’s your boy and he’s my great-grandbaby.”

“Nobody is calling the law,” Marlene said. “I’m calling my son.”

She did not call him there. She walked out to her car and sat in it with the door shut, and we could see her through the windows with the phone to her ear. She did not wave this time.

Then she called the care center and told them she would be late, which she has done maybe twice in twenty years. Then she drove out of the lot toward Dyersville and the body shop.

Rollie came over from the coffee counter with a donut on a napkin and set it in front of Grandma without saying anything. He just patted her shoulder twice with his big hand and went back to his stool.

“I was promised a donut,” Grandma said to me, and she ate it, standing right there at the lottery counter, in little bites. I think it was the only thing she could think to do with her hands.