Chapter 9
JACK
Saturday I had Noah for the afternoon. Emily and Dan had a wedding two hours away. Maddie went to a friend's. Patty was at the library until three — there's a Saturday shift she takes twice a month — so it was me and a six-year-old in a garage from noon until whenever.
I put him on the workbench stool with the wobble in it and told him not to lean back, which he then did for four hours.
We were fixing the wheelbarrow, which is not a real job.
It's had a soft tire since spring, the patch kit has been on the shelf since spring, and the actual repair takes eleven minutes.
With Noah it takes an afternoon, because everything has to be explained twice, then handed to him, then found again.
"Why is it flat?"
"There's a hole in it."
"Why?"
"Something poked it."
"What?"
"Probably a thorn."
"From what?"
"From a thorn bush."
He thought about that. "Is it still in there?"
"That's what we're going to find out."
He liked that answer enough to repeat it to himself twice.
Getting the tire off a wheelbarrow with a six-year-old assisting is a two-man job in the sense that one man does it and the other man loses the nut.
"Hold this."
"What is it?"
"That's the nut. Don't put it down."
"I'm holding it."
"Don't put it down on the bench, because it'll roll."
"I KNOW."
He put it down on the bench and it rolled. We spent four minutes on the floor with a flashlight before he found it under the shelf, and he was so pleased with himself that he wanted to lose it again on purpose.
Then I showed him the water in the bucket, which is the good part. He got his sleeve completely soaked holding the tube under, and when the bubbles came up he yelled like we'd hit oil.
"THERE. THERE. RIGHT THERE."
"That's it."
"That's the hole!"
"That's the hole."
He wanted to touch it, so I let him touch it, then we roughed it up with the little metal scraper, which he did too hard, and I let him do it too hard.
"Is it fixed?"
"Not yet."
"But we found it."
"Finding it isn't fixing it."
He thought about that a good deal longer than I expected him to.
Around one thirty he asked whether he could use the drill. I said no. He asked whether he could hold the drill. I said yes, so he held it with both hands on the bench for about ninety seconds, breathing loud, then put it down and said it was heavy. I said it was. That was that.
He asked how old I was and I told him. Then he asked if that was older than his other grandpa, meaning Dan's father, and I said yes, by about a year.
"So you're the oldest one," he said, with some respect.
"There's Great-Grandma Vi."
"She's not a grandpa."
"That's true."
"Is she a hundred?"
"She's ninety-one."
"That's basically a hundred."
Somewhere around two he went quiet, which with Noah means he's building up to something.
"Grandpa."
"Yeah."
"Is Grandma Pat my grandma?"
I had the patch in my hand. I didn't look up right away, because I needed a second and I didn't want him watching me take it.
In May I'd have had it out of my mouth before he finished the question.
I've said it in some version probably fifty times.
Well, bud, Grandma Rose is your grandma.
Patty is Grandpa's wife. She's like a grandma.
Every piece of that is true. You could hold it up to the light.
I've stood on job sites where a man shows me a beam that meets code in every dimension and is still, obviously, in the wrong place.
The other one came up right behind it. You bet she is, bud. Big and warm, Grandpa handing down a ruling from the top of the ladder. I could feel how good that one would sit in my mouth, and that's how I knew.
"What do you think?" I said.
He looked at me like I'd asked him whether water was wet. "Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He was already turning the tube over. "Can I do the glue?"
"Hang on."
"Can I though?"
"In a second."
"Because the hole is on this side."
"I know where the hole is."
And that was it. Three seconds. He didn't hedge, didn't check my face for the right answer, didn't ask a follow-up. He answered the question and went back to wanting his hands in the glue.
I let him do the glue. He put on about four times what it needed and I didn't say anything about that either.
"Is that enough?"
"That's plenty."
"Is it TOO much?"
"There's no such thing," I said, which was a lie, which cost the patch nothing, and which I decided on the spot was going to be my policy on a number of matters going forward.
While it set we sat on the step with the door up.
He had a juice box out of the fridge out there, the one Patty stocks with juice boxes for exactly this reason, next to my beer and a jar of screws.
He asked whether the wheelbarrow was old and I said older than his mother.
He asked whether it had ever been new, which is a real question if you think about it, and which I could not answer, because I bought it at an auction in 1997.
"Grandpa."
"Yeah."
"Does the thorn bush know?"
"Know what?"
"That it did that."
"No," I said. "Thorn bushes don't know anything."
"Does it hurt them?"
"Does what hurt who."
"When you pull the thorn out of it."
"No."
"How do you know?"
"I don't," I said, which he took without any argument at all, then he drank his juice with tremendous noise.
I'd been taking this in pieces since Wednesday.
At the sink. In the truck. Sitting on a step with a beer.
And every ounce of the complication in it was mine.
Not Rose's — Rose said one thing at four in the morning, once, a dozen years back, and then got on with being a grandmother, which she's good at, which she has never once used as a weapon.
Not Emily's — Emily wrote grandmother in pen on a school form and I fixed it before it got to the office.
Not this kid's, either. This kid has had it figured out since he could talk.
His answer takes three seconds and requires no diagram.
Just mine. A woman he loves keeps his pajamas in a drawer and knows what a fever does to his legs. I built a system of exceptions around that. I kept it running a dozen years, telling myself the whole time it was for the peace of the group.
There was no group. There was a hallway in 2013 and a man who never went back to check.
"Grandpa."
"Yeah."
"Are we putting it back on?"
"When the glue sets."
"How long?"
"Fifteen minutes."
"How long is fifteen minutes?"
"About four of these." I tipped my chin at the juice box. He considered that, then drank the rest of it in one go, which he seemed to think would speed things up.
We put the tire back on at three and it held.
He wanted to know whether it would hold forever.
I said nothing holds forever. He said, "But like a year?
" and I said probably a year, which satisfied him completely.
Then he rode in the wheelbarrow twice down the driveway, which I should not have done at my age, and which we agreed not to mention.
"One more."
"No."
"One more and then never."
"That's not a real deal, bud."
"It is if you say yes," he said, which is the truest thing anybody said to me that month.
He asked at some point whether I was going to the school thing, and I said I was. He asked whether Grandma Rose was going, and I said she was. Then he asked whether Grandma Pat was going.
"You'd have to ask her."
"She's coming."
"You sound pretty sure."
"She's bringing the snack," he said, in the tone of a man explaining something obvious to a slow colleague.
"What snack?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then how do you know there's a snack."
He looked at me like the question was beneath both of us.
Later he leaned back on that stool, went off it sideways into the recycling bin, came up with a bruise on his hip. He did not cry, which he then wanted to tell everybody about.
Patty got home at three thirty. He was out of the garage before her door shut.
"Grandma Pat! I found the hole!"
"You found the hole?"
"It was a thorn."
"A thorn."
"And I did the glue and I did too much."
"You can never do too much glue," she said.
"That's what I said," he said, which he had not said.
"Did you have lunch?"
"We had hot dogs."
"How many."
He held up two fingers, which meant three.
"Did anybody have a vegetable?"
"There was ketchup," I said.
"Jack."
"He had an apple in the truck."
"When?"
"Tuesday," Noah said, from the doorway.
She came into the garage with a bag of the pretzels he likes and looked at the wheelbarrow, then at the tools all over the floor, then at me.
The old thing came up in my throat anyway. Like heartburn. Patty, bud, sitting right behind my teeth for no reason at all, in my own garage, with nobody there but the three of us.
I swallowed it. "He did do too much glue."
"I heard." She handed over the pretzels. He took them and went inside to eat them somewhere I couldn't supervise.
Patty stood there a second with the empty bag in her hand. "You okay?"
"He asked me if you were his grandmother."
She didn't move. "What did you say?"
"I asked him what he thought."
"And?"
"He said yeah." I put the scraper back in the box. "Then he asked if he could do the glue."
She laughed. It got out of her before she could arrange it, one short surprised note, and she put her hand over her mouth like she'd said something rude at a funeral.
"Six-year-olds," she said.
"Yeah."
"He got glue on the step."
"He got glue on a lot of things."
She stopped in the doorway. "Jack."
"Yeah."
"That was the right answer."
"I didn't give an answer."
"That's what I mean," she said.
She went in. I stayed out there and finished putting the tools away, which took longer than it needed to.
The patch kit went back on the shelf where it's lived since spring, next to a coffee can of washers, a jar of screws, a folded-up piece of cardboard I've been meaning to throw out since the Obama administration.
I stood and looked at all of it for a while, then I turned the light off.