The Stand I Wheeled Grandma To

The Brake by the Cash Box

The square still smelled like last night’s rain when I pushed Grandma’s chair up over the curb and onto the grass. It was not quite eight in the morning. All around us the booths were waking up, generators coughing, awnings cranking open, somebody’s radio playing gospel a little too loud.

Grandma had her good hand folded in her lap. Her left one was tucked under the quilt I had laid over her knees, the one with the strawberries on it, which I had not picked by accident.

She did not say anything on the way across the grass. She had told me the night before what she wanted, and Grandma was not a woman who said a thing twice.

I wheeled her straight up the side of her own stand.

The sign over the serving window read Hazel’s Funnel Cakes in letters my granddad painted back in 1984. He touched them up every spring until the year his heart gave out. The red had gone soft and chalky. The little strawberry he had put beside the H still had a chip in it from the time the trailer slid off its jack in the church lot.

Janet was already inside, tying her apron behind her back. She looked up when the shadow of the chair crossed the window, and for one second her face did a thing I will carry with me the rest of my life.

She looked caught.

“Mama,” she said. “What in the world. You should be home resting.”

“I rested five months,” Grandma said. Her words came slow on the left side, the way they had since March, but every one of them landed. “I am done resting.”

I rolled the chair up snug against the stand, right where the serving window met the little fold-down counter, and I set the brake with my foot. The brake clicked. The cash box sat on that counter, the gray metal one with the dented lid, and I put Grandma’s chair so close to it that her good hand could have rested on top of the thing without her leaning.

“Bethany,” Janet said to me, quieter now. “She does not need to be out in this heat.”

“She asked to come,” I said. “So we came.”

My husband, Scott, was already at the fryer in the back of the stand, and he did not say a word. He just gave Janet a nod and turned the burner up under the oil. Scott is not a talker. He is a doer, and what he does with a funnel cake would make you cry.

Grandma reached up with her good hand and laid it flat on the counter beside the cash box, the way you would lay your hand on a dog you had not seen in a long while.

“All right,” she said, to nobody. “All right then.”