The Eleven Widows I Called That Night
The note was half a sheet of yellow paper, and my grandson handed it to me upside down.
Henry is eight. He does that with papers from school when he already knows what they say and does not like it. He set it on my kitchen table next to the plate of apple slices, turned his backpack around so the zipper faced the wall, and climbed up on Walt’s old chair without a word.
I turned the paper right side up.
It was from the elementary school office, with the bulldog at the top. It said that after careful thought, the school would not be holding Grandparents Day this year. And then came the line I read twice, standing there with my glasses pushed up on my forehead.
“So few of our children have grandparents nearby.”
That was the whole reason. One sentence. It thanked us for understanding and was signed by the principal, Ms. Keller.
“Does that mean you can’t come, Grandma?”
Henry was not looking at me. He was lining up his apple slices by size.
“It means they aren’t having it, honey.”
“But I learned the poem.”
“I know you did.”
He had been learning it since August. It was eight lines about a grandmother’s hands, and his teacher, Mr. Sims, had handed it out the second week of school. Henry had said it to me in the car, in the bathtub through the door, and once in the grocery store in front of the bananas. He got stuck on the sixth line every single time, and every single time he would squeeze his eyes shut and get it.
“Did we do something wrong?” he asked.
“No, sir. Nobody did anything wrong.”
“Then why can’t you come?”
I did not have an answer for him.
I am Dolores. I am seventy-one years old, and I have lived in Aurora, Nebraska, since I was a bride of nineteen. I pick Henry up from school four days a week because his mother, Kim, works the front desk at the clinic until five thirty, and because my son Dan works for the co-op. In October, when the corn is coming out, working for the co-op means Dan climbs into a grain cart tractor before daylight and climbs out of it sometime after the ten o’clock news. Nobody sees him in October. That is not a complaint. That is harvest, and it pays for Henry’s shoes.
And I was one of the few. I understood that right away, reading that yellow paper. Henry’s school was saying that most of the children had nobody like me close by, and Henry was one of the ones who did. I live nine blocks from the front door of that building.
They had taken it away from him because he was lucky.
I stood at the sink a long time after he went in the other room to watch his program.
I will tell you what Grandparents Day was at that school, so you understand what a small thing it was and how large.
It was one hour on the first Friday in October. The second grade put it on, all three classrooms. You came at nine o’clock and sat in a chair made for a child, and your grandchild showed you a folder of work and read you a book. Then the whole class stood up and said a poem at you. There was a cookie. You were home by ten fifteen.