The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed

How many times does a child have to be passed over before she decides she was never going to be picked?

I have been turning that question over since a Tuesday afternoon in February, when my granddaughter Josie came in the back door of my kitchen with her coat still zipped to her chin and set a greeting card on my counter.

She squared it to the edge, the way she does everything.

Josie is ten. She is the neatest child I have ever known, and I say that as a woman who fed Calder Elementary for thirty-one years and has seen every kind of child come through a lunch line.

The card had a smiling yellow sun on the front.

Inside, in round teacher handwriting, it said:

Dear Josie, you were wonderful in class. I have decided Piper will represent our room at the school finals on Thursday. I want to spare you the nerves. I know you will be so proud to cheer her on. Love, Miss Lanier.

I read it twice. Then a third time, because I wanted to be sure about the word “decided.”

Not “chosen.” Not “voted.” Decided.

“It’s okay, Grandma,” Josie said.

She took her coat off one arm at a time and hung it on the hook by the door.

“She’s probably right. I do get nervous.”

And then she put her right hand flat on my counter and tapped her thumb against her first finger, once, twice, three times, the way she does when she is trying to get a word out.

She was not trying to say anything. She was just alone with it.

I want to tell you how we got to that counter. It starts with a man who is not in this story anymore, and with a pie.

The pie

My husband Walt stuttered.

He stuttered from the time he was four years old until the day he died, and in between he built a good life around it the way you build a fence around a bad corner of a pasture. He ran the elevator scale at the co-op for twenty-six years, which is a job where you can mostly point. He sang bass in the Methodist choir, because Walt never stuttered when he sang, and that is the kind of thing God does that I have never been able to explain.

But he did not order his own pie at Dottie’s Corner Cafe until he was forty years old.

I had been ordering for both of us for seventeen years. He would say, “She’ll have the, I’ll have the, what she’s,” and I would say, “Two coconut cream, Dottie,” and we all pretended that was a regular way to run a marriage.

That day in 1996, he put down his menu and said, “I w-w-would like the coconut c-cream pie, please.”

It took him maybe fifteen seconds.

Dottie wrote it on her pad like it was a hundred-dollar order. The three farmers at the counter turned their stools halfway around and did not make a sound, and when he finished, old Orville Tate raised his coffee cup an inch off the saucer and set it down again.

That was the whole parade.

Walt ate that pie with his ears red and his shoulders back, and he never again let me order for him.

When our granddaughter started to stutter at age five, he was the first to notice and the last to say anything about it. He took her along to the elevator on Saturdays, and he never once finished a sentence for her.

And one afternoon, when she was six and had gotten stuck on the word “tractor,” he put two fingers over her small hand and said, plain as anything:

“Tap it, Josie girl. Let your hand keep the beat, and your mouth will come along behind.”

It worked about two times out of three.

That was Josie’s inheritance from her grandfather. A trick with her thumb, and the knowledge that a person can take fifteen seconds and still be heard.

Walt died in March, two years before the card on my counter. Josie was eight. She did not cry at the funeral. She cried three days later in the cab of his pickup, which I could not bring myself to sell, with her hand on the steering wheel and her thumb tapping against the rim.