Chapter 3
JACK
Maddie was born in November. Emily was twenty-five, a year and a half married to Dan, who I liked fine then.
I like him better now. She had a bad delivery — thirty-one hours of it, then the section anyway.
By the time I got to the hospital Rose had been there since two in the morning, having driven up in her raincoat with a bag of things Emily hadn't asked for, half of which turned out to be exactly right.
Patty came at ten. She'd worked her shift because I told her to, because I said there was nothing to do down there but sit, and that part was true enough.
Five of us were doing it. She came in with flowers from the grocery store, stopped in the doorway, looked at all of us jammed in there, and waited to be waved in.
There were four chairs in that room. Rose had one.
Dan's mother had one. Dan had the one by the bed, and I had the one under the window with my coat over the back of it.
Emily was propped up looking like somebody had run her over, holding a baby in a hat, and everybody was talking at once about the hat.
"That's not the one from the shower," Dan's mother said.
"It's the hospital hat."
"They give you a hat?"
"They give you that one," Rose said. "Then you buy nine more."
"How's the coffee down there?" Dan said.
"It's a machine."
"Is it bad?"
"It's a machine, Dan," Rose said.
Patty was still in the doorway with the flowers in that crackling plastic.
"Come in," Emily said.
And Patty said, "I don't want to crowd you."
And I said, cheerful as a man at a picnic, "There's not a lot of room in here."
She stood there another four or five seconds.
"Here." Dan was already up. "Take mine."
"I'm fine."
"Take it."
She took it. She sat down on the edge of it with the flowers still in her lap, because the sill was full and there was nowhere else to put them.
Later a nurse came in to do something with the line and we all stood up except Emily.
When we sat back down Patty had the chair nearest the door.
She held those flowers the whole visit. On her way out she put them in the sink in the family bathroom at the end of the hall, in about an inch of water, and they were still sitting there on Thursday.
We'd been married three years then. She was thirty-nine when I met her, forty-two that year, and she had never had children.
She'd spent a good part of her thirties being told that was still fixable.
Then she met me, and I came with a grown daughter.
She was so careful with Emily that first year that it was hard to watch.
Never once said I'm like a mother to you.
Never once put a hand on Emily's arm in a way that claimed anything.
Rose noticed everything back then. She asked me that winter how Patty liked the new job, and she had the name of the branch ready.
The day after the baby came, Rose said the thing to me out in the corridor by the vending machines.
She had a coffee she wasn't drinking and she kept turning the cup around on that little ledge under the glass.
The machine was down to pretzels. I read the row twice so I wouldn't have to look at her.
"I'm not being ugly," she said. "I just want to be her grandmother. I don't want to have to share the word."
That was the whole thing. The baby was a day old. Rose had been awake since two o'clock the morning before, and she was not campaigning.
"Nobody's taking anything from you, Rose."
"Okay," she said.
She drank the coffee then, the whole thing, standing up, and dropped the cup in the bin under the machine. It had to have been stone cold. In all the years since, she has never brought it up again.
I brought it up. Not out loud — every time since then, inside my own head, in a hundred parking lots.
The divorce had been four years done by that point, civil the way a bad winter is mild.
Nobody died. Everybody was tired. We'd gotten Emily through a wedding without an incident, which took planning on both sides: seating charts, phone calls, me telling my own mother to sit down.
By the time Maddie came I had a track record. I was the guy who kept it smooth.
That first Christmas I made three phone calls to sort out who arrived when.
"Two o'clock," I told Rose. "Em's doing the ham at four. You come at two, you get her to yourself for an hour before anybody else is in the house."
"You don't have to do this."
"It's a phone call."
Nobody asked me to make them. I was proud of those calls for years. Rose came at two and had Maddie to herself on the couch with the tree on. When Patty got there at four she took everybody's coats.
So that's what I decided, standing in that corridor by the pretzel machine.
I was not going to let this turn into one of those families, the kind where the holidays get split down the middle, where a kid learns to say one thing at one house and another thing at the other.
The way to stop that was to keep everything labeled.
Clear categories. Rose is Grandma. I'm Grandpa. Patty is Patty.
And it worked. Rose came to the christening. Rose and Patty sat in the same pew. Nobody has ever thrown anything in my kitchen, and Emily has never once had to manage a war, which is more than I can say for what my own mother put me through over my father's second wife.
The other thing, and I'll say this straight: Patty told me she was fine.
Not in those words. What she said, in the car on the way home from the hospital, in the dark, with the flowers in her lap because there hadn't been room on the windowsill, was, "I don't want to step on Rose.
I'm Patty, that's fine. I'm not trying to be anything I'm not. "
I took that, put it in my pocket, carried it around ever since like a note from a doctor. It never once crossed my mind that a person can say a true thing on a Tuesday and have it stop being true by March.
Wednesday I went upstairs, changed my pants, came back down, and we ate the pork chops. They were dry, which they never are. Neither of us said a word about it.
Thursday I got out early again. The Bickle building has a load-bearing problem the owner does not want to hear about.
I was done arguing by two, so I drove over to the school and parked in the second row where Patty parks.
She wasn't coming — Thursday's Emily's — but Emily texted at two forty asking if anybody could grab him because a closing had gone long, and I told her I was literally sitting in the lot.
The doors opened at three and Noah came out sixth or seventh, hanging onto the strap of a kid named Bo. Bo's grandmother was two cars up with her window down, and she waved at me. Two years of waving at that woman and I've never once learned her name.
"Grandpa!"
"Hey, bud."
"I have a splinter."
"Where."
"It came out," he said.
He got in with the whole production it takes. The belt in the county truck is stiff, so he has to lie back into it and haul with both hands. He will not accept help. He narrates the struggle.
"It's stuck."
"Pull it slow."
"I AM."
"Slower than that."
It clicked. He announced that it had clicked, and then he told me about a caterpillar. The caterpillar's name was Steven. Bo had said caterpillars turn into moths, which was wrong, and which he had corrected in front of the whole class.
"Butterflies," he said.
"Some of them are moths."
He looked out the window a second, deeply insulted, and declined to comment. Then he said, "Bo's grandma has a pool."
"In October?"
"She has it in October too. It's just cold."
"Have you been in it?"
"No," he said, and left it there. And then, out of nowhere, the way they do:
"Grandma Pat has my blue jacket."
I said, "Patty — "
And I stopped.
It was mechanical, not any kind of insight. My mouth started the word and something in my throat caught it the way a hand catches a screen door.
Because I heard it.
Grandma Pat has my blue jacket.
He'd said it the same way he'd said the caterpillar's name was Steven. It was where his jacket was. It was who had it.
"Grandpa?"
"Yeah."
"Can we get it?"
"Get what."
"My jacket. It's blue."
"Sure," I said. "We'll get it."
"Now?"
"After."
"After what."
I pulled out past the buses with my hands on the wheel and everything in that cab perfectly normal, the radio going low, a kid kicking the back of my seat because his legs don't reach anything.
Going by the car wash he counted the flags out loud and got it wrong, the way he does.
He skips nine every single time, so there are eleven flags out there and he has never once made it past ten.
About twelve miles an hour past the school zone sign I heard the other half of it.
He'd said it in front of me. He'd said it in front of me on Wednesday too, in the parking lot, right after I told his teacher she was just Patty. He's been saying it a year, maybe longer, and every time he says it somebody with grey in his beard tells him no.
And he keeps saying it anyway. It's a thing he knows.
We got the jacket. It was on the hook inside Patty's back door where it lives, under the tote bags, and I had to move four of them to find it. They were all from the library.
I stood in that kitchen holding a blue jacket the size of a pillowcase and looked at the refrigerator. Nine drawings. A school lunch calendar with the Fridays circled. A photo from the fair with the three of them on a bench, Maddie pulling a face, Noah blurred because he never stops.
Patty was still at work. Nobody was home.
"Grandpa, can I have the pretzels?"
"Ask her."
"She's not here."
"Then you know the answer."
"How many?"
"Grandma Pat says a handful."
"Whose hand?"
He held up his own, which was the answer he was after, then he got the pretzels. He knew which cabinet. He knew which shelf. He dragged the chair over without asking anybody, because in that house he has never once needed to ask.