Chapter 5
JACK
Saturday I got the booster seat, then I did a thing I had not planned on, which was open the hall closet.
The school stuff lives in plastic tubs on the shelf above the coats.
That's Patty's system. Every June whatever came home that year gets sorted.
The good drawings go on the fridge until Christmas, then into the tub.
Report cards and class pictures go straight in.
There's a tub for each kid, with MADDIE or NOAH on the end in Patty's handwriting on a strip of masking tape.
I don't know what I was looking for. The new seat came in a box that needed a place to go.
The box wanted the shelf. The tub was on the shelf, so I got the tub down and sat on the hallway floor with it, which is a stupid place for a fifty-eight-year-old man to sit.
My back went about four minutes in. I didn't get up.
Maddie's goes back to preschool. There's a handprint turkey in there with her name spelled MADYE.
There's a thing built out of a paper plate and dry macaroni that has shed most of its macaroni over eight or nine years.
There's a photo of her at maybe four in a fireman hat.
Down in the bottom corner, a dried-out glue stick with no cap on it, a spelling test with a 92, a bookmark made from a paint chip off the rack at the hardware store, the kind they let kids take by the handful.
There's a field trip permission slip from 2018 that never got turned in, which explains a thing Emily was upset about for a week that year.
About halfway down there's a manila envelope with CARDS written on it. Birthday cards, every year, the ones the kids made. Patty keeps them all. I knew that without ever once having had one of them in my hand.
Maddie's handwriting starts out a disaster and gets organized around age seven.
There's one that says HAPY brITHDAY GRANPA with a truck on it.
There's one that's nothing but a cake with more candles than any human being has had.
There's one from about third grade with a heart on it that says TO GRANDPA, and inside, in pencil, LOVE MADDIE.
And then there's the one.
Fourth grade, I'd guess, from the writing. It's for Patty — blue construction paper, folded once, a lopsided flower on the front in marker. Inside:
TO GRANDPA AND GRANDMA PATTY HAPPY BIRTHDAY PATTY LOVE MADDIE
The word GRANDMA has a line through it. Not scribbled out, not a kid's messy cross-out. One clean line drawn with a straight edge or a steady hand, and above it, in pen, in adult handwriting, in my handwriting: Patty.
So it reads TO GRANDPA AND ~~GRANDMA~~ Patty PATTY, which doesn't even make sense. I'd corrected it and left the redundancy sitting right there, because I wasn't editing for sense. I was editing for one word.
I sat in the hallway with it and remembered doing it, all at once, the way a smell brings back a room.
Kitchen table. Maddie upstairs or out in the yard.
Emily had brought them over for Patty's birthday, back when Maddie was in fourth grade.
There was a cake from the Kroger with the too-sweet icing Patty pretends to like.
I was helping set the cards out when I saw that one, and the first thing I did was look at the clock.
Because Rose was coming at four. She was dropping Maddie's soccer bag off on her way to something, so she'd be in that kitchen about eight minutes, and the card was going to be standing open on the counter.
I can still see the counter. The cake box with the plastic dome. Emily's car keys on the mail pile, which means she'd been there a while, which means she was in the house.
The cards were propped in a row against the sugar canister the way Patty does it, because she's a person who displays things.
So I got a pen. Not a marker — a pen, out of the cup by the phone, the cheap kind from the credit union. I remember reaching for it. That's the whole memory of deciding.
I was heading off an awkward moment. That's what I had in my head at the time, and I believed it. If Patty had asked me that night what I'd done all day I'd have said nothing.
Maddie wrote that. A nine-year-old picked up a marker and wrote GRANDMA on the front of a card without anybody prompting her, because that's what she had in her head. Then a grown man with a pen decided what she had in her head was a clerical error.
And Patty got the card, with the line already drawn through it.
She never said a word. She opened it at her own kitchen table in front of her own family.
She read the crossed-out word. She knew whose handwriting was above it.
She said thank you honey, it's beautiful, and she put it up on the refrigerator.
Where it stayed for a month. Where Rose saw it, probably, and thought nothing at all.
I put the card back in the envelope, then I took it out again, because putting it back felt like the same move as the pen. I folded it once and put it in my back pocket.
Then I went through the rest of the tub.
A class picture from first grade with Maddie in the second row squinting.
A certificate for reading forty books. A program from a Christmas concert, folded, with MADELYN CARTER circled twice in pencil, and the pencil is Patty's, because she circles the name so she can find it later, which she has done for every program of both those kids' lives.
I've watched her do it in the dark of that auditorium thirty times.
There's a construction paper thing shaped like a hand with a poem on it about mothers, from a Mother's Day in second grade.
That one stopped me, because I couldn't remember Maddie giving it to anybody, and it was in Patty's tub in Patty's house.
It's addressed to nobody. There's a blank where the name goes.
I don't know whether a teacher told her to leave it or whether a nine-year-old made a decision, and I'm never going to know, because I am not going to ask a twelve-year-old to explain something she did in second grade so her grandfather can feel better.
Before I got to Noah's stack, which is thinner because he's six, there were two more of Maddie's school forms.
The first is from second grade, an emergency contact sheet, one of those photocopied things with the boxes.
Three lines for adults authorized to pick up.
Emily's handwriting fills two. The third says PATTY SLOAN, and in the little box marked RELATIONSHIP it says, in Emily's handwriting, grandmother —
and underneath, in different ink, somebody has written (step-grandmother).
That is also my handwriting.
I sat there and did the arithmetic on it.
Emily wrote grandmother — Emily, whose comfort I have been protecting for a dozen years — on a school form, in ballpoint pen, without hesitating.
And then I got hold of that form on the way to the school office and made it accurate.
I never told her I did it. Why would I. It was a form.
There's a second one from fourth grade and on that one the box just says PATTY.
So somewhere between second grade and fourth grade Emily stopped writing grandmother.
Either the forms kept coming back different, or I said something, or she just learned the house rule the way you learn a house rule, without anybody ever posting it on a wall.
Near the bottom there's a wobbly thing made of popsicle sticks with a photograph glued in the middle, from the Fourth of July four years back.
Noah's on Patty's hip in a shirt with a flag on it, with her hand flat on his back, and neither one of them is looking at the camera.
Somebody wrote on the stick along the bottom in pencil, faded now, still readable if you tilt it.
MY FAMILY. No names, just that.
I held that one a while. The photograph had come loose at the top corner and I pressed it back down with my thumb, which did nothing, because the glue was four years gone.
I put the tub back on the shelf. It took three tries to get the lid on square. The box for the booster seat went somewhere else, then I stood in that hallway a while with my hand on the closet door.
My job is that somebody wants to put a deck on the back of a house and I go look at whether the footings will hold it through February.
When one comes down you can usually point at the reason — bad plans, short materials, the inspector before you signing off on something he never got under.
What I had on that hall floor was a dozen years of me measuring the same thing wrong.
Not once. If it were once I could call it a mistake, and a mistake is a single event with a date on it.
This had a date on it every year. It had a date on it in Maddie's preschool, at the fire station last Halloween, in a parking lot on Wednesday.
Patty came home at four thirty with groceries. I heard the car and got up off the floor before she came in, because I didn't want to have to explain what I was doing down there.
I carried the bags. She let me. We put things away, her doing the fridge and me doing the cans, the way we've done it a thousand times.
"I got the seat."
"I saw it in the truck. Tailgate's down."
"I'll get it."
"You always say that."
"I'll get it before dark," I said, which I did, eventually.
"It's the same brand. I checked the height on it."
"Okay."
"The clip on the old one's shot."
"I know. I told you that in June."
"You told me the strap."
"The strap is the clip, Jack." She put the milk in without looking at me.
She folded the bags. She's got a drawer for them, it is always too full, and she has never once let me throw any out.
"That drawer's coming off its track."
"Then it comes off its track."
"I could put a new slide in it."
"You could," she said.
The card was still in my back pocket. I could feel the corner of it against my hip every time I bent down to the cans.
"Patty."
"Mm."
"Do you want the tubs down for anything?"
"Why would I want the tubs down."
"I don't know. I had them out."
"You had them out."
"The box for the seat needed the shelf."
She stopped with a can of soup in her hand and looked at me for a second. I watched her decide not to ask.
"Put them back the way they were," she said. "Maddie's goes on the left."
"It's on the left."
"It's usually on the left."
"Nothing," I said. "Never mind."
She looked at me about two seconds longer than she needed to. "Okay," she said, and shut the drawer.