On the FIFTH DAY Josie stopped hugging her grandfather, and she did it with both hands behind her back.
She had loved that man since before she could walk.
Now she was nine, and she would not come past the arm of his chair.
Ray taught her to skate on the driveway in Ottumwa when she was three.
He taught her dominoes, and how to spit off a porch rail, and how to lose a hand of cards without crying about it.
The best man alive, she used to call him, and she meant it.
Bridget asked if we could keep her ten days while the shop got audited.
We said yes before she finished asking.
The first days went by on waffles and cartoons and the same argument about bedtime.
Then the notebook showed up.
A cheap spiral thing with a bent cover and a sticker peeled halfway off the front, and she carried it room to room like a plate she might drop.
She SLEPT with it under her pillow.
On THURSDAY she started sitting where she could see the hallway.
I told myself she missed her mother.
That evening I said, “Go give Pop a hug before you brush your teeth, sweetheart.”
She shook her head and kept walking.
Nothing about her looked scared. She was working something out.
The guest room door clicked.
I sat on the edge of the guest bed, moved her hair off her cheek, and waited the way you wait for a kettle.
“Baby, you always hug him,” I said. “What changed?”
She looked at the ceiling a long time, picking her words the way her mother does.
Then she said it.
“He’s DIFFERENT now, Gran,” she said.
My hands went cold on the blanket.
“Different how?” I said.
She pulled the notebook out from under the pillow and opened it to a page with a date at the top and one line under it.
“I wrote down the days HE FORGOT ME,” she said.
Then she started reading.
Forty-One
“March fourteenth. He called me Bridget in the truck. Two times and then he laughed like he did it on purpose.”
She moved her finger down to the next line.
“March twenty-second. He asked me where my school is. I said the same place, Pop. He said which same place.”
She read six more without me asking. April sixth, he sat in the pickup line with the engine off after the bell and told her they were early. April nineteenth, he said your mother, and then he said whose mother. May second, he took the long way home and told her the long way was the way.
Every entry had the date on top and one sentence under it, and every sentence was hers, nine years old, with definitely spelled wrong both times.
I put my hand flat on the page.
“That’s enough for tonight,” I said.
She let go of it. That is the part that got in under my ribs. She handed it over like she had been waiting a long while to give it to somebody with a driver’s license.
I sat on the edge of that bed with it on my knees. Ray’s chair creaked in the front room. The television went to a mattress commercial and the furnace kicked on for the first time that fall.
March fourteenth.
She had been in my house since Sunday.
I turned the pages with my thumb, the way you check a used book for money somebody left in it. There was a date on every one of them, straight through to the Thursday we were sitting in.
There were forty-one lines in my granddaughter’s notebook, and thirty-nine of them had happened in a truck I had waved at from the front porch with a dish towel in my hand while my own life went on quiet in the kitchen. Josie had only been here under our roof since Sunday, sleeping with that cheap paper tucked under her pillow like something that might burn the sheets, but she had been keeping count through the spring and all through the heat of the summer while we grew tomatoes and ate sweet corn off the cob. A nine-year-old girl sitting in the passenger seat of an old pickup, listening to the man who taught her dominoes call her by her mother’s name, writing down every time he turned the wrong way down a street he had driven all his life. Thirty-nine times he had pulled out of that school drive and forgotten who was sitting beside him, and thirty-nine times I had watched them pull back into the gravel and thought nothing in this world was wrong. How do you sit in a warm house all through the year and miss the person you love going missing down your own road?
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Last November, Bridget sat where I put the mail and asked Ray to do the school runs.
The shop had gone to six days and she couldn’t be at the register and at the pickup line at ten past three. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Ray would get Josie at the school and drive her the eleven blocks to the shop and sit in the back with her until Bridget closed.
He said yes before I could get my mouth open. He was sixty-eight then. He had been retired four years and he hated it the way some men hate it, quietly, in the yard.
Bridget offered gas money. He said no. She put a twenty under the sugar bowl anyway, and after she left he went out to the truck and came back in with a little spiral pad and a golf pencil, and he clipped the pad to the visor with the sun clip.
“I’ll keep it honest,” he said. “Six point two, round trip. She can pay me at Christmas.”
He wrote the date at the top of the first line. He always did that. He taught it to Josie the summer she was seven, when she started keeping a list of the birds off the porch rail.
“Put the day on it,” he told her. “Otherwise it never happened.”
He kept his spare truck key in the dominoes tin on the shelf by the door, under the double-six, and had since 2009. He kept the good tape measure there too. The tin has a picture of a lighthouse on it and it comes from a tire shop that closed before Josie was born.
Every Tuesday and Thursday for a year, my husband got in that truck and went and got our granddaughter, and I stood on the step with a dish towel and waved at the tailgate.
I was sixty-six years old and I thought I knew everything that happened in my own house.
Behind me in the front room he lowered the volume and turned his head.
“Whose car is that in the driveway,” he said.
It was our car.
The Road by the Church
I read all forty-one lines that night at the kitchen table with the light over the stove on.
They were not about names. I had it wrong from the first page. Four of them were about names, and the rest were about the truck.
He drove around our block four times and told her he was looking for a parking space. He turned into the Casey’s and sat there and said they were waiting for somebody. He asked her, at a green light, whether her mother knew where they were.
Twice she wrote that he pulled over and put his hands in his lap and stayed there while she counted to a hundred.
And on the twelfth of June, in the middle of a page, in her handwriting, not the same size as the rest:
Mom said not to say.
I read that line four times and then I got up and put the notebook in the bread drawer, which is a thing a person does when there is no right place for something.
In the morning I gave him his waffle and asked him about the block.
“Josie says you go around a few times sometimes,” I said. “Before you get to the house.”
He didn’t look up. He cut the whole waffle into squares first, all of it, the way he has done since I met him.
“The road by the church is closed,” he said. “Water main. You have to come at it from Ash.”
“Since when?”
“Since they closed it,” he said.
I took the car out at nine and drove past the church twice.
The marquee still said the same thing it said in August.
The Visor
Saturday I went out to the truck while he was in the shower and I unclipped the pad from the visor.
November was clean. Six point two, six point two, six point two, in his handwriting, small and squared off, with the date on top of every line the way he taught the girl.
March had a seven point one and an eight in it. Little wrong numbers. A wrong turn, a gas stop.
By April the numbers were not six anymore. Fourteen. Nineteen. Twenty-two, on a Thursday, for eleven blocks and back.
The handwriting had gone downhill in a way I didn’t have a word for. Not shaky. Sliding, like the line was going out from under it.
And on the eighth of June, at the bottom of a page, with no destination written beside it, one number by itself.
41.
I sat in that truck with the pad on my knee and the door open and my feet on the driveway where he taught her to skate.
Then I went in the house and took his keys off the hook by the door and put them in my coat pocket.
He looked for them for twenty minutes that afternoon. The bowl, the dresser, the pockets of the coat he wasn’t wearing, then the bowl again. He didn’t ask me. That is the thing I keep. He didn’t ask me, because he had stopped asking anybody anything.
Josie stood in the hall doorway with the notebook against her chest and watched him go through the bowl.
Then she came and stood next to me at the sink.
“Do you have them,” she said.
“No, honey,” I said.
She went back to the couch and opened the notebook and wrote something with the date on top of it, and I let her, because I had just taught a nine-year-old that this is a house where you lie about where things are.
I came down for the coffee at six and the driveway was empty.
A Dollar Twenty-Nine
She was already awake. She was sitting up in the guest bed with her back against the headboard, and she had her socks on.
“He took the tin key,” she said.
I sat down on the end of the bed because my legs quit. The dominoes tin was open on the shelf by the door with the double-six turned over on top of the tape measure.
I called his phone. It rang in the front room, on the arm of his chair, on top of the TV guide.
There is nothing to do in that situation but sit in a room with a child and wait, and I am not going to pretend I did it well.
She put the notebook in my lap.
“You can read the rest,” she said. “I don’t care.”
I went to the back of it instead, because I wanted to see how many pages she had left, and that is where it was. Inside the back cover, in ink, in my daughter’s handwriting, the letters that lean right and never close at the top:
Date at the top. What he said. What he did. Just one line. Call Mom, not Gran.
Under that, three dates in Bridget’s hand, filled in already. February twenty-eighth. March second. March ninth. One sentence each, hers, adult sentences.
The girl’s own first line was March fourteenth. She had been given the first three as an example.
I turned it over and looked at the front, at the bent cover and the sticker half off it, and I got my thumbnail under the sticker and peeled it the rest of the way.
A price. One twenty-nine. And under the price, the little inventory code Bridget puts on everything on her own shelves, four letters and the year.
It came off the rack by her register. She sold spiral notebooks to schoolkids for a dollar twenty-nine, and she took one out of her own inventory and she wrote the instructions in the back, and she handed it to a nine-year-old and told her which grandmother to call.
Headlights came up the driveway. I heard the truck door, and then the screen, and then a plastic bag on the counter.
Josie had her hand on my wrist.
“Mom said you’d take it away,” she said.
Tuesday, Ten Past Four
He had gone for waffle mix. He came in with the box and a bottle of syrup and said he couldn’t remember whether we had syrup, and the pad on the visor said 22 for a store that is three miles round trip.
I called Bridget and told her not to come Sunday. Come Tuesday, I said, at four, and come in and sit down.
She came in with a folder.
She had it under her arm when she hugged her daughter, and she put it on the table next to the sugar bowl, and she talked for eleven minutes without me saying one word.
She had dates. She had the school’s number and a name in the office. She had the name of a woman at the bank and the date her father signed something twice on the same line. She had been to see somebody about guardianship in July, and she said the word petition twice, and she said she wasn’t going to be talked out of it by two people who wanted to keep pretending.
“You had him in a truck with my kid every Tuesday and Thursday since November,” she said. “You waved at them. Mom, you stood on the step and waved at them. What was I supposed to do, ask you? You’d have told me he was tired.”
“I’d have told you he was tired,” I said.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So you gave it to Josie.”
“I gave her a notebook,” she said. “I gave her one line a day. She’s nine, she’s not made of glass, and she was in the truck. I wasn’t in the truck.” She stopped and pushed the folder an inch toward me. “I couldn’t be in the truck. I have a shop.”
Ray was on the porch. He had been out there since she pulled in, in the metal chair, with his back to the window.
I got up and got the mileage pad out of the drawer where the twine is and put it on the table on top of her folder.
“April, twenty-two miles,” I said. “June eighth, forty-one. There’s nothing in your folder that’s worse than that, and I’m the one who found it, and I’m the one who’s signing. Not you. Today. And it happens in front of him, because it’s happening to him.”
The screen door opened before I got to the end of it.
He came in with an envelope, folded the long way, soft at the crease the way paper gets when a man carries it in a coat all summer.
He put it on the table and sat down and didn’t open it.
“Fairfield,” he said. “June eighth. I went by myself. I got turned around on the way back and put forty-one on the pad and wrote it down, because I said I’d keep it honest.”
Bridget picked it up. She read it with her hand over her mouth, and then she read it again with her hand down, and her chin went, and she set it back on the table facedown.
“Since June,” she said. “You’ve had this since June.”
“I didn’t know how to say it in front of your mother,” he said. “So I didn’t say it.”
“You let me do all of this.”
“I didn’t know what you were doing,” he said. “Nobody told me anything either.”
He took his keys out of his front pocket and set them on the table. Then he got up and got the tin off the shelf and put the spare key in it and set it in front of me instead of her.
Josie was in the hall doorway with the notebook against her chest, the way she had been all week.
Bridget put her hand out for it.
Josie walked past her mother and put the notebook in Ray’s hands.
The Arm of the Chair
Bridget kept her home for eight weeks. She didn’t say it was punishment and I don’t think she could have told you what it was. The truck went to a man in Eldon for eleven hundred dollars in October, and I do the school runs now, Tuesdays and Thursdays, eleven blocks, and I stand at the register with my coat on until she closes.
Thanksgiving she brought her at eleven in the morning.
Josie came through the door and went straight down the hall past the arm of his chair and put both arms around his neck from behind it, which is a thing she used to do and which he never once liked.
He held on to her wrist. He had the notebook open on his knee with the golf pencil on top of it.
He writes in it now. One line, most days. Some days I write it for him and he tells me what to put.
She got down on the rug next to the chair and turned the page for him and he looked at the fresh one a while.
“Put the day on it,” he said.
She wrote the date at the top.
If this one got to you, send it to whoever in your family has been doing the driving.
For more stories about life’s unexpected turns, check out I Told Him I’d Come. The Envelope Was in the Drawer With the Takeout Menus., where an intriguing invitation sets the stage, or read about another pivotal moment in I Was Thirty-Nine and Signing for a Van When I Saw Him.
