The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

The cold was coming off the lot in waves, and he had no coat on. I think he had forgotten it.

“I should have told you kids in March,” he said, without looking up.

“Told us what?”

“Mother went down on that kitchen floor. Heart. Pam went over with her pills and found her lying there with her eyes open.” He turned the cap over. “She rode in the ambulance. She stayed all night at the hospital.”

“Mother made her swear on her own mother’s name not to tell the family, and Pam kept that for nine months. Every single morning since, she’s walked over there to see if Mother is still standing.”

I did not say anything. I could not.

“She’s not been herself about the sale,” Ed said. “She figured if she could take the biggest thing off Mother’s shoulders, Mother would be safe. It was the wrong way to go about it.”

“She knows it now, I think. But she went about it out of fright, Megan, and that’s the God’s honest truth.” He put the cap back on. “And I let her carry it alone. That one’s mine.”

“Does she know we know?”

“She’ll figure it out. She keeps the books.” He almost smiled. “She can count to fourteen.”

We sat a minute. Out on the lot, the line had dissolved into families walking to their trucks with foil pans held against their coats, steam still lifting off the lids.

I saw the plow brother who had bought four dozen holding the pan up to his face and breathing in.

When I went back inside, the hall was nearly empty. Pam had gone. I do not know where, and I did not ask, and nobody in my family has told me.

The caterer’s cards were still taped to the folding tables, with the nine dollars crossed out in someone’s pencil. Lisa and Jolynn were folding the paper tablecloths. Beth stood at the window with her phone, taking a photograph of the empty trays.

Grandma still sat at the head of our table in her floral apron, small and straight in the folding chair, with a thin hand flat on the paper tablecloth over the crumbs.

Mrs. Kowalczyk’s lawn chair stood empty beside her, where somebody had set it close. I went to her and crouched down.

“Are you tired?” I asked.

“A little,” Grandma said. “Good tired.” She looked at the long window and the gray parking lot and the last of the cars pulling out. She looked, I thought, like a woman who had set something heavy down.

Sophie came over carrying her poster board sign with its border of tulips. She held it out to Grandma. “Do you want to keep it?”

Grandma took it in both hands. She looked at the tulips for a long moment. Then she folded it in thirds, the way she folds her dish towel, and tucked it under her arm.

“Next year,” she said, “four hundred and fifty.”