Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

I took her home after that. We did not talk much in the car. When I helped her up her front steps she held on to my arm harder than usual.

“I don’t want the money,” she said at the door. “You tell Marlene that. I just want him to tell me the truth.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

I went to my afternoon visits. I worked on a woman in Cascade who had broken her wrist in a fall and could not button her own coat, and I did not think about my grandmother more than every thirty seconds.

At about one o’clock my phone buzzed. It was Marlene.

“Get Grandma,” she said. “Bring her back to the store. Two o’clock.”

“What happened?”

“Just bring her,” my sister said. “Please, Jodie.”

So I moved my last visit to Friday and drove back into town. Grandma was waiting on her porch in her camel coat and her bonnet before I even pulled up. Marlene had called her too.

“I’m not going to yell at him,” Grandma said as she got in the car. “I want you to know that ahead of time.”

“Nobody’s going to yell, Grandma.”

“Good,” she said. “Then let’s go.”

It was a bright, windy afternoon by then, the kind of March day when the clouds move fast and the light comes and goes across the fields. The store was busier than it had been in the morning.

There were men in from the co-op on their break, and a couple of mothers with little kids buying slushies, and Rollie, who I believe had never left. Dorcas was still behind the counter. Her shift should have ended at noon.

“I stayed,” she said when she saw me looking. “I wanted to see this.”

Marlene’s car was parked by the air pump. She was standing beside it with her arms crossed, and next to her, with his hands jammed in the pockets of his work jacket and primer dust on his jeans, was Tanner.

He looked about twelve years old.

When he saw Grandma get out of my car he took his hands out of his pockets and then didn’t know what to do with them. He put them back. He took them out again.

Marlene said something to him I couldn’t hear. He nodded, and they walked into the store together, my sister one step behind him like she was making sure he went where he was supposed to.

Grandma was already at the lottery counter. She had chosen her spot and she stood in it, her cane hooked over the edge, her purse on her arm.

Tanner walked up to her. The store got quiet. Not all at once, but the way a church gets quiet, from the front to the back. The men at the coffee counter stopped talking about the fields. Even the slushie machine seemed quieter.

“Grandma,” he said. His voice cracked on it. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Grandma, I lied to you.”

She looked up at him. He is six foot two and she is barely five feet, and she looked up at him the way she looked at him when he was four and broke her porch window with a baseball.

“I know you did,” she said. “I want to hear you say why.”

He told her. He told her about the truck and the ditch and the $3,000. He told her about the boy who kept calling him and coming by the body shop. He said he’d been scared for four months and that when the machine played that song he felt like God had answered him.