The Woman Who Kept My Grandfather’s Paper Alive

Friday at Seven Minutes Past Five

I was in the parking garage under my office building on the afternoon of the thirtieth, in my car with the engine off. I had not been able to concentrate on anything since lunch. At 3:44 Gladys phoned, and when I answered, all she said was, “Eleven hundred.”

“She made it?”

“Dewey Stenberg bought seven for his grandchildren and put her over. Rosalie hugged her. I am told that has never happened.” My grandmother was very quiet for a moment. “Your grandfather would have given the world to see it.”

I sat there until five. Then I sat there another seven minutes, until my phone buzzed on the dashboard, and the screen said Ardith Sandvig and under it, 1,214.

I wrote back one word. I wrote Monday, because I had no other word that would not have been a speech. I had said enough to her to last us both a while.

I put my head on the steering wheel. Then I called my wife and told her the number, and she said, “Eleven hundred and fourteen people,” and I said, “Twelve hundred and fourteen,” and she said, “I know, I wanted to hear you say it.”

I did the arithmetic in the car. Twelve hundred and fourteen at $38 is $46,132. It was more than the Sioux City offer by $12,132, and it had been paid by people who had never been asked what the paper cost, because my grandfather had been too proud to ask them.

The Pen

On Monday the ninth I had slept on Sumner Street, in my father’s old room, and at breakfast Gladys put the eggs down and sat across from me with her hands folded. She wanted to ride along to the office, and she had wanted to be at the curb at nine, and she would not be talked out of either.

She had one more thing to say, and I will tell you about it because it is the part that frightened me. “You are giving up $34,000,” she said.

“I know.”

“You will not be able to say we should have taken it.”

“I will not say it.”

“The Social Security and what is in the book will last me three or four years,” Gladys said, looking out the kitchen window at the bare maple. “After that I will come live in the room over your garage and be a nuisance to your wife.”

“Gran, we do not have a room over the garage.”

“Then build one,” she said. “I am not going to sell a newspaper to Sioux City so I can be comfortable in the year 2030. I know what a town does when it loses its paper. It starts finding out who died at the grocery store.”

“The building is ours,” she went on. “She will rent it from us. Do not give her the office for nothing. She will refuse, and she will be right to.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred and fifty a month. It is the rent your grandfather charged the Beacon for forty years on paper that he never collected.”

So that was settled over the eggs. The estate keeps the building. The paper pays $350 a month, which is $4,200 a year, and which I would have gladly given up, and which Ardith insisted on within about thirty seconds of being told. When I raised it, she said, “Brett, nothing is free. Somebody just isn’t charging for it,” and I have been repeating that sentence to myself ever since.

I took out my grandfather’s fountain pen. Gladys had given it to me at breakfast in her own kitchen, and I had put it in my breast pocket where I used to see him keep it, and I realized only when I took it out that I was holding it the way he did, with two fingers and a thumb.