Chapter 15
PATTY
In April we took Noah to the park by the reservoir, the one with the two playgrounds and the paved loop where the fitness class does the thing with the bands.
He's seven now. That happened in January, at a party with a rented pizza oven that Dan regretted. Seven is different. Seven has opinions about which playground, about whether a jacket is necessary, about whether the shortcut across the grass counts as a shortcut if it's longer.
It was one of those Saturdays that turns up in the middle of April and makes everybody in the county behave badly — sixty-eight degrees, everybody out, half the men in shorts they should not have been in.
Jack had the folding chairs in my trunk next to the booster seat.
Noah wanted the far playground, which is the one with the tall slide, and he was gone before we got the chairs out.
"Stay where I can see the top of your head," Jack called.
"He can't hear you."
"He heard me."
We set up on the grass near the loop. Jack had a coffee.
I had the bag with the water bottles, the sunscreen, the extra socks, the granola bars, because I have not gone anywhere without a bag of contingencies since 2013.
He put the chairs in the wrong place first, out in the sun, then moved them twice, which is a thing he does and which I have stopped commenting on.
"Here's fine," I said.
"There's shade over there at two."
"It's April."
"You'll want it at two," he said, and moved them again. He was right at two.
The Wednesdays held, more or less. Not every one — he missed three over the winter, a burst main out on Ledger Road, a hearing, the week he had the flu and lay on the couch making noises.
The Ledger Road one was the third of December.
He called me at one forty. The reason was good; the reason was four hundred people with no water on a Wednesday.
I moved my afternoon around, I asked Denise for the desk, I took my lunch at eleven thirty the way I used to, and that night I was short with him about the recycling.
He knew what it was about and he didn't say so, which was the right call, because there was nothing to say.
The main had to be fixed. I got to be tired about it anyway.
I have not heard him correct anybody since October.
I've been listening for it the way you listen for a noise in a car, and I have caught him going to do it — once in a checkout line at the pharmacy, once with a nurse at Maddie's ankle appointment.
Both times I watched it come up in his face, that same little lift in the shoulders, and both times I watched him put it down.
He never mentioned either one, and that's how I know it's real.
If he'd told me about it, it would have been a receipt.
Other things happened in there too, and none of them were about a word.
In December there were four chairs in the fourth row and five of us.
Emily counted them twice, the way you do, as though the number might come out different on the second pass.
Jack took his coat off and hung it over the back of the one on the end.
Then he stood behind it for fifty minutes with his hands in his pockets, over at the side where the wall is, while I sat in it.
Nobody said anything about it. Rose asked me which one was Noah's class and I told her the risers on the left.
She said thank you, squinted, never found him.
In the parking lot afterward Jack said he was fine. Nobody had asked.
In January the school sent home a form about the spring field trip with a line for a chaperone. Emily wrote my name on it, and nobody looked at it twice. It went back to school in Noah's folder with a granola bar wrapper.
In February, when he had the fever, Jack took the second half of the night.
He came down at one thirty in his sweatshirt and said, go to bed, I've got him.
I said something about how I was already up.
He said, Patty, go to bed. I woke at six.
The two of them were asleep in the recliner with the television on mute, a bowl on the floor that had not been needed.
In March I said the whole sentence out loud at work.
Denise asked how the ankle appointment went and I said, my grandson's sister sprained it doing something insane on a scooter.
It came out flat and ordinary, like a sentence about the weather.
Denise said, "Those scooters should be illegal," and that was the end of it.
I thought about it the rest of the afternoon anyway.
At the park, a woman on the fitness loop stopped near our chairs to tie her shoe. She was maybe sixty, with a dog on one of those leashes that goes out forever, and the dog had opinions. Noah picked exactly that moment to come off the tall slide and run at us full speed with something in his fist.
"GRANDPA. GRANDMA PAT. There's a frog."
"There's no frog," Jack said.
"There IS."
"In your hand?"
"No, in the thing, in the wet part, by the fence — "
"Show me your hand."
He opened it. It was a bottle cap.
"That's a bottle cap."
"It's a good one."
"It's a good one," I agreed.
"I know, but there's ALSO a frog."
The woman with the dog laughed, straightened up, said the thing people say, in the tone they say it, easy and warm, expecting a simple answer.
"Are you his grandparents?"
The whole apparatus came up in me. Fifteen years of it, six months of not needing it, and there it was — the paragraph, the little history lesson, well, he's my husband's daughter's boy, delivered with a laugh so the nice woman with the dog wouldn't have to do anything awkward with her face.
And I thought about the hardware store.
That was January. A man Jack knows from the county asked after the grandkids.
Jack answered him, then started to add something.
She's Emily's, my daughter's. He got four words in and stopped, which is worse than finishing or not starting.
He stood there holding a box of furnace filters while the man waited on him, then he said the boy was seven now and they talked about a snowblower for six minutes.
He was quiet in the car afterward and I let him be quiet.
It has been three months, and neither of us has said one word about it since.
So I did not know what he was going to say to the woman with the dog. I had my own sentence up in my mouth, ready, because I was not sure.
Jack said, "Yes."
That's all. One word, in the voice he uses for the weather.
Not yes, sort of. Not yes, well, he's my daughter's boy and this is my wife.
Not the little laugh he used to put on the front of it, the one that told you a footnote was coming.
Just yes, the way you'd answer if somebody asked whether that was your truck.
"He's a live one," the woman said.
"He's seven."
"Say no more." She got her dog off the grass. "There's frogs in that drainage. My grandson finds them every time."
"Told you," Noah said to Jack.
She went on around the loop. He stood there a second, breathing hard, looking back at the wet part by the fence, doing the calculation about whether it was worth it, then he said, "Grandma Pat, can I have the water?"
I gave him the water. He drank about a third of it, poured a little on his own head for no reason at all, handed it back, and ran.
Jack watched him go. "Frogs," he said.
"There's probably a frog."
"There's no frog."
"There's going to be a frog in this car."
"There's going to be a frog in this car," he agreed.
I sat back in the chair. The fitness class started up their thing with the bands and somebody's radio was going down by the water.
"You okay?" Jack said, after a minute.
"I'm fine."
"You went quiet."
"I'm watching for the top of his head."
He didn't push it. There was a version of that man who'd have asked twice and then a third time in the car, then made it into a conversation with a shape to it.
"There he is," he said. "Yellow slide."
"I see him."
I kept thinking about the woman with the dog, who is not going to remember any of us by Tuesday. She asked a simple question and got a simple answer. Four seconds. There's not one thing in it worth telling anybody.
Nothing changed about what I am to that boy.
I was that the week Emily brought him home, and I was that all through the years when a man with a pen kept writing a different answer over the top of it.
And nothing changed about what Rose is to him either.
She had him a whole weekend in March while Emily and Dan went to Nashville.
She sent me a photograph at eleven at night of the two of them watching a movie neither of them was allowed to be watching.
I didn't tell Emily. Rose knew I wouldn't.
A word never made me anything. It just, finally, stopped saying I wasn't.
Jack got up around one and went to stand at the fence by the drainage with him for twenty minutes.
I watched from the chair — the two of them bent over a concrete lip in the grass, an old man with his hands on his knees, a boy flat on his stomach with his arm down a pipe.
Then Jack came back, sat down, said that was enough of that.
"You were down there a while."
"There's no frog."
"You said."
"There is a very large amount of mud," he said, "and I want it on the record that I told him about the mud."
At two the fitness class packed up their bands. A girl went by on a scooter with no helmet and I didn't say anything. Jack said, "See, that's how Maddie did the ankle," and I said I know. Neither of us said a word to the girl, because she was somebody else's.
Emily texted at two fifteen asking if we could keep him till four. Jack read it off my phone upside down.
"Tell her till dinner."
I typed it. Three dots came up, went away, came back. Both of you are the best, she wrote.
Noah came back forty minutes later with wet shoes, both socks in one hand, and no frog.
"It went in the pipe," he said, furious.
"That's where they live," Jack said.
"I ALMOST had it."
"I've got dry socks," I said.
He looked at me the way he does, like of course I did, like it would have been strange if I hadn't.
Then he sat down in the grass at my feet and put his hand out for them without even asking.
I got the wet ones off him. A spoonful of the reservoir came out of the second one, and Jack said something about the upholstery that nobody responded to.
"Grandma Pat."
"Mm."
"Next time can we bring a bucket?"
"For the frog."
"For the frog," he said, like I was slow.
"We'll bring a bucket," I said, putting the dry socks on him, one and then the other, while he held on to my knee for balance.
THE END
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