The Solo Her Grandmother Tried to Stop

What I decided on the highway

Gloria-Jean’s house was eighteen miles from the elevator. It was a straight shot down the highway and across town. I had driven it a hundred times dropping Nora off and picking her up.

I spent those eighteen miles deciding what I was not going to do. I knew my own temper.

I am not a screamer, but I can say a thing in a quiet voice that does more damage than a scream.

I could have called the school and asked them to send someone. I could have called the sheriff’s office and made it about custody papers.

I could have gone up those steps and said every single thing I had thought about that woman for twelve years.

But every one of those roads ended the same way. Nora would stand in a hallway in her costume and watch two grown women fight over her, while her show went on without her and somebody else’s girl sang her part.

That was the whole of it. I wanted my daughter on that stage more than I wanted to win anything.

Arguing in that driveway would only cost her the one thing she had been waiting for since January.

So I made myself one plain promise somewhere past the county line. I would not raise my voice.

I would not go in the house. I would say one sentence, and I would leave with my girl.

At a stop sign on the edge of town I texted Nora. “I’m coming. Put on your costume and wait by the front door. You don’t need to say anything to Grandma.”

She wrote back one word. “Ok.” Then a second message came right behind it. “She has my shoes.”

“Bring what you can,” I wrote. “We’ll figure out the shoes.”

The driveway at 1:20

I pulled into Gloria-Jean’s driveway at 1:20 by the clock on my dash. Her yard was neat as a pin.

She already had the beds turned over for spring, and the tulips along the walk were up about three inches.

I did not honk. I did not go up the steps. I got out and stood in the driveway with my keys in my hand and my tan co-op jacket still zipped up to my chin.

For a minute nothing happened. A dog barked a few houses down. Somebody was running a leaf blower, cleaning out a flower bed from the winter.

Then the front door opened, and Nora came out.

She was in her red costume dress, the one I had hemmed on my kitchen table the Tuesday before with my reading glasses on and pins in my mouth.

Her curly brown hair was half pinned up and half falling down.

She was carrying her gray sneakers in her hand. Gloria-Jean had hidden them in the hall closet, and Nora had found them on her way out. She came down the steps in her stocking feet.

Gloria-Jean was right behind her. She stood in the doorway in her cardigan with one hand on the frame, and she did not come down the steps either.

“She’ll freeze up there,” Gloria-Jean said to me across the yard. “She’ll get up there in front of the whole town and she’ll freeze, and they’ll laugh at her. I’m saving her from it.”

I want to be fair to her, because I found out the reason later and it is a human one.

When Gloria-Jean was nine, she forgot her lines in a Christmas program at a country school, and the older boys laughed at her for the rest of the year.

She had carried that around for almost sixty years. In her mind, she was keeping Nora from the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

But you do not say that to an eleven-year-old who is standing in front of you in her costume.

You do not hide her shoes. There is no reason in this world big enough to cover that.

“She’s coming with me,” I said. That was my one sentence. Then I added a second one, because I meant it. “You’re welcome to come watch her.”

Gloria-Jean folded her arms across her cardigan. Her mouth went thin. “When she freezes up there, Harmony, you remember that I told you.”

I did not answer that. I opened the passenger door for Nora, and she climbed in with her shoes in her lap, and I walked around and got in and backed out of the driveway slowly, the way you drive past a school.

I looked in the mirror once. Gloria-Jean was still standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. She did not wave, and neither did I.