Two Lawn Chairs at the Flagpole

“You sit,” she said, nodding at the other chair.

“I’m fine standing,” I said. I was too nervous to sit. I stood behind her with my hand on the back of her chair and watched the side doors of the lunchroom.

The lawn was quiet. Down by the road a man in a county truck was mowing the ditch.

A few other families were spread out on blankets, younger mothers with babies, an older man with a thermos.

At 12:04 by my watch, Mom straightened her cardigan and touched her hair.

At 12:05 the bell rang inside, faint through the bricks, and the side doors banged open and the third grade came out like water out of a pipe.

Mason came out in the middle of the crowd, in his blue T-shirt, his blond hair buzzed short for fall the way Troy likes it.

He was looking toward the back playground. He took three steps that way.

Then he saw the flagpole, and he saw the green chair, and he saw who was in it, and he stopped dead in the middle of the grass like somebody had called his name.

Then he ran. He ran the whole width of that lawn, his sneakers flashing, and he hit his grandmother so hard the old chair rocked back on two legs before I caught it.

“Grandma,” he said into her shoulder. “Grandma, you came. Kendra said you weren’t coming.”

“I always come,” Mom said, with her arms around him and her cheek on top of his head. “Haven’t I always come? Twenty four pies, and every one of them has your name on it.”

He let go of her, finally, and sat down cross-legged on the grass right at her feet, the way he used to sit at story time. Mom held out the tin.

He took a pie and bit into it, and closed his eyes, and said, “Mmm,” the way his grandfather used to say it at her table.

I had to look up at the flag for a minute.

A little girl with braids was the first to come over. She stood a few feet off and looked at the pie in Mason’s hand, and then at the tin, and then at my mother.

“What is that?” she asked.

“That’s a fried pie,” Mom said. “Dried apple. Would you like to try one, sweetheart?”

The girl nodded. And that might have been the end of it, except that two boys from Mason’s class had been watching her, and then they came over, and then three more behind them.

Within about two minutes there was a ring of third graders sitting in the grass around my mother’s lawn chair, more children than I could count, all of them looking at that pie tin.

I started to panic a little. There were twenty four pies and the line of children kept growing, and some of the other grandparents had begun to look our way from their blankets.