The Letter My Grandfather Read
“It’s a lot of good money to spend on a lost cause,” my mother said.
She said it the way she reads the weather off the kitchen radio. Flat. Finished. Like the matter had been settled somewhere above my head and she was only passing along the news.
I had her on speaker in Mark’s truck. We were parked outside the feed store, because it was the only place in Marlow Creek where I could get a bar of service without somebody I knew tapping on the window. I had called to tell her the date. October 11th, at the Grange hall, with Pastor Don doing the ceremony at the Methodist church first. I had practiced the call twice in the shower.
“Mom, it’s not a big wedding,” I said. “A hundred people, maybe. Pulled pork. Mark’s cousin has a speaker.”
“A hundred people.” She let that sit. “Bree, you are thirty-four years old.”
“I know how old I am.”
“Then you know nobody throws a party over a thing that has been this long coming. I won’t stand up in front of this town and act like it’s a surprise.”
“You don’t have to act. You could just come.”
“I’m going to say this once, because I’m your mother and somebody has to.” Her voice did not change at all. That was always the worst of it. She never raised it. “It is a waste of good money on a lost cause. Save what you have. You’ll need it.”
Then she said she had a casserole in the oven, and she hung up.
The truck was quiet. Mark had both hands on the wheel, though we were parked, and a muscle was working in his jaw. He is a lineman for the electric co-op. He climbs poles in January with ice on the crossarms and does not rattle.
“I’m going to drive over there,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“Bree.”
“Please don’t.” I put my hand on his arm. “She’ll just say it again, slower. And then I’ll have to hear it twice.”
He didn’t go. He said, “Okay. But I want it on the record that I wanted to.”
Then I was crying, and he pulled me across the bench seat and held on while a man in a seed cap walked out of the feed store with a fifty pound bag on his shoulder and very politely looked at nothing.
My mother is not a monster. She has never missed a church supper, and she pays her bills the day they arrive. What she did was send the money one direction.
Everything she had went to my sister Brandi, and what was left came to me, and nobody ever said so out loud.
Brandi is four years older. She is tall and quick and easy to love, and she was born when my mother was nineteen and frightened and my father was driving a feed truck for the co-op elevator. By the time I came along, my mother was tired. I think that’s the plain truth of it. She had poured herself into one daughter, and when the second arrived there was a little less to pour.
When Brandi turned sixteen, she got a used Buick Century with a stereo, wrapped in a bow in the driveway. When I turned sixteen, I got that same Buick, six years older and well past a hundred and forty thousand miles. The transmission went out in six months. My mother called it “a good lesson in taking care of things.” I took care of it, all the way to a repair bill of $1,100 that I paid out of my vet clinic wages, one hundred dollars at a time.