The Birthday in Grandpa’s Hayloft

The rail

Grandpa drove the cake box to Dana’s house on Sunday after church, in his good overalls, with the windows down.

He told me about it that evening on the porch, in about forty words, because he is a man who counts his words the way other people count change.

He said her car was in the drive. He said a curtain moved in the front window when the truck pulled up. He said he did not get out and he did not honk. He walked up the steps and set the box on the porch rail with the fork on top, and he walked back down.

“Did she come out?”

“Didn’t wait to see,” he said. “Folks can tell if you’re waiting.”

Maisie was on the porch swing beside him, swinging her feet, the way she did when her grandmother died and she was six and said nothing at all.

“Pop Pop,” she said. “Did you tell her it was from me?”

“I didn’t have to, Mae.”

“How would she know?”

“Five slices,” Grandpa said. “Nobody else would have counted.”

I heard from my sister by text two days later. It was eleven words long, and it is not mine to share. I read it standing in the driveway with the car door open, and I wrote back four words, and neither of us has mentioned it since.

I am not going to tell you it is mended. It is not. Some things take a Sunday at a time, and some things take longer, and I am not in a hurry to find out which this is.

The loft door

The Saturday after the party, Grandpa had Ken come out with a pry bar and a pair of work gloves.

He had decided the big loft door was a nuisance. It sticks on a damp day and swings shut in a good wind, and an old man should not have to chase a door.

Ken lifted it off its track, with Grandpa directing from a lawn chair. They propped it against the back wall and bolted a stop block to the beam so it could not be hung again.

“There,” Grandpa said. “Now it can’t be shut. Folks can tell.”

I stood in the barn and looked out through the opening at the whole bright pasture. The rope was still tied to the beam. The hay pile under it had gone flat, with a hundred small hollows in it where thirty-one children had landed.

That night Maisie came to dinner in the pink sweatshirt she had refused to take off since Saturday. There was a piece of hay still stuck in the hem, and one more in the cuff.

“Mama, can I keep it like this?”

“Like what, baby?”

“With the barn in it.”

I told her she could.

It hangs on the hook by her bed now, with the hay still in it, and every morning before school she runs her thumb along the sleeve to check that it is all there.