The Birthday in Grandpa’s Hayloft

The call from the rink

The rink called Thursday morning while I had a patient in the chair. I am a dental hygienist at Dr. Mabry’s office on the square, and I do not usually take calls with somebody’s mouth propped open. I took this one. Something in my pocket told me to.

It was a teenager named Virgil, sorry and nervous, reading from a note the manager had left him. “Ma’am, the other party bought out the full floor for the two o’clock block on Wednesday. A full-floor buyout outranks a party-room slot, and the manager says that’s in the paperwork you signed. We’re real sorry. We can refund your whole deposit.”

“Whose party?” I asked, though I knew.

“I can’t say, ma’am.”

“That’s all right, Virgil.” They gave me back my $140. They offered me a Sunday slot at four o’clock, after a church group, and I told him I would think about it.

I thought about it for the length of one cleaning. Sunday at four was not Maisie’s birthday. Sunday at four was a consolation prize with a disco ball.

At lunch I sat in my car in the lot behind the office, with a pimento cheese sandwich I did not eat, and I cried for four minutes by the dashboard clock.

It was not the money. It was thirty-one kids. It was Maisie’s face when I would have to say the word “canceled.” It was thirty-four years of being Dana’s little sister, finally arriving at a place where I had no more room to put it.

Then I wiped my face with a napkin and called Grandpa.

Grandpa Homer

My grandfather, Homer Kaiser, is eighty-one years old and still farms forty acres of fescue and orchard grass off the Cornersville Highway. He cut his second hay in July and put it up with my husband and two neighbor boys, and the barn was full from the floor to the rafters.

I had not told him anything yet when he answered. I said, “Grandpa, I need a favor.” “Hay’s in,” he said. “Barn’s full. Whatever it is, bring it.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“I know your voice, Winnie. I knew your voice when you were six and lost your shoe in the creek. Is it Maisie?”

“It’s her party. The rink fell through.” There was a short quiet on the line. I could hear his screen door and the dog.

“How many kids?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Well,” Grandpa said. “That’s a crowd. I’ll hitch the wagon to the tractor. You tell them to wear a coat.”

He did not ask why the rink fell through. He did not ask who. He has known all of us a long time, and he has a way of not asking that makes you tell him later, on your own, when you are ready.

I should say who he is to my daughter, because it matters for what came after. Maisie has been Grandpa’s shadow since she was four years old. She sits on a cushion on the fender of the tractor on Sundays and tells him which row looks crooked. She calls him Pop Pop. He calls her Mae, and nobody else is allowed to.

When my grandmother June died three years ago, it was Maisie who sat in the porch swing beside him, six years old, saying nothing, holding his hand. She stayed there an hour. He told me later it was the only hour that whole week he could breathe.

I have always known that Dana saw that. I did not know yet how long she had been carrying it.