The Solo Her Grandmother Tried to Stop

Six forty in the evening

We got home a little after five. I made grilled cheese and tomato soup, which was what Nora wanted, and she was still wearing the red dress over her jeans, and I let her.

At 6:40 that evening my phone rang on the kitchen counter. The sun was still up over the elevator out west, coming in long and gold through the window over my sink.

It was Gloria-Jean’s number.

I learned later how it had gone. Royal had come off the rig at six and walked to the locker and found my voicemail and then the video.

He had watched it sitting on a bench in the change shack with his coveralls still on.

He watched it twice, he told me. Then he walked outside into the cold and called his mother from the gravel lot of the man camp outside Watford City, with the wind blowing so hard she could barely hear him.

He did not yell at her. Royal is not a yeller, either. He just asked her one question.

He asked her whether it was true that she had told the school his daughter was sick.

She said it was. And then he told her something I did not know he had in him.

He told her she would not be keeping Nora on his weekends anymore. When he was working, Nora would stay with her mother.

I picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.

“Harmony,” Gloria-Jean said. Then she did not say anything at all for a long time. I could hear her kitchen clock ticking behind her. I waited.

The Christmas program

“I watched it,” she said finally. “Royal sent it to me. I watched her sing.”

“She did good,” I said.

“She did,” Gloria-Jean said, and her voice broke right down the middle of it.

Then she told me about the Christmas program. She told me about the little country school with one teacher and the stove in the corner, and how she was nine, and how she had one line to say as an angel.

She forgot it. She stood up there in a bedsheet with a tinsel halo and opened her mouth and nothing came.

The older boys laughed, and they called her the dumb angel until the spring, and she never stood up in front of people again in her life.

“I thought I was sparing her,” she said. “When she put on that dress this morning, all I could see was me in that bedsheet. I thought if she never got up there, nobody could ever laugh at her.”

I let her finish. I did not interrupt her, and I did not tell her it was all right, because it was not all right. But I understood it, and there is a difference.

“Gloria-Jean,” I said, “you told an eleven-year-old in her costume that she would only embarrass herself. You hid her shoes. You told the school she was sick. She sat in your bathroom and texted me.”

“I know,” she said. “I know it.”

“She doesn’t need to hear about the Christmas program from me,” I said. “If you want her to know why, you’ll have to tell her yourself. To her face.”

There was a long pause. Then Gloria-Jean asked if she could come by in the morning after church.