The Woman Who Kept My Grandfather’s Paper Alive

Subscriber Twelve Hundred and Fifteen

Before I left that afternoon I asked her for something.

“I would like to subscribe.”

She looked at me over her glasses. “You are in Des Moines.”

“It is a hundred and thirty miles. The mail goes.”

“It is $38.”

“I know what it is.” I took out my wallet. The dollar was in it, behind my license, and I did not take it out. I took out two twenties and gave them to her, and she gave me two ones back from the cash drawer, and then, because she is Ardith, she took out the ledger.

It is not the old ledger. It is a new one, green, with a cloth spine, that she had bought at the drugstore on Tuesday. She wrote on the first line of a clean page, in blue pencil and then in ink, the way she signs everything. Brett Rask. Des Moines. Paid. And the number beside it.

1,215.

“That is not an even number,” Paige said, looking over her shoulder. “I would have rounded it up.”

“We do not round,” Ardith said. “We count.”

I carried the first copy out to the car. Gladys was at the curb in the passenger seat, with the window down, and she held out her hand for it without a word. She read page one. She turned to page six. Then she folded it into quarters and put it in her purse, next to the bank book she has carried to every funeral for sixty years.

“It is a good paper,” my grandmother said.

“Is it?”

“It spells the names right,” said Gladys, and she rolled up the window.

I drove her the one block back to Sumner Street. In the mirror I could see Main Street going by, the feed store and the cafe with its lights on and the Beacon’s sign over the door. In the front window were two things taped to the glass, a note in my wife’s handwriting and a baby picture. Kristen had sent them on Tuesday, I learned later, and I had not known.

Afterward I took the long way and stopped at the cemetery. My grandfather’s stone is new and still the color of wet sand, and under his name, in smaller letters, are the words the family chose. Publisher. Neighbor.

I stood in the wind with my hands in my coat and told him the number. I told him it was twelve hundred and fifteen, and one was mine.

Then I went back to the car, where my grandmother was reading the obituaries out loud to herself in a low voice, the way she does, and I got in and we went home to Sumner Street, and I put the Beacon on the table where he used to read it, and it was Thursday, and it had come.