She kept saying she didn’t want a big goodbye.
“Just a hot dog, a lawn chair, and a crowded parking lot full of junk,” Grandma told me. “I don’t need all the fuss.”
But we knew. We all knew this wasn’t just a casual Sunday outing. Her procedure was scheduled for Tuesday morning. They said it was routine, but when a woman her age says things like “just in case I don’t come through it,” it hits different.
So I loaded the car with snacks, folding chairs, and two paper bags of the greasy takeout she loved. My cousin met us out there with extra sweaters, just in case the wind picked up.
And there
The Kind of Place She’d Been Going Since Before We Were Born
The flea market out on Route 9 is not pretty. It’s not the kind of place you’d see on a lifestyle blog. The pavement buckles up near the back row. There’s a guy who’s been selling the same set of socket wrenches for eleven years. The funnel cake stand has a handwritten sign that says CASH ONLY and another one underneath it that says PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CHANGE.
Grandma loved it.
She’d been coming here since the late seventies, back when she and Grandpa used to drive out on Saturday mornings and buy things they didn’t need. A ceramic rooster. A set of encyclopedias missing the M volume. She had a whole system: walk the outer ring first, then cut through the middle, stop at the candle lady, stop at the man with the records, get food, sit down, watch people.
She’d taught me the system when I was nine.
I hadn’t thought about that in years until she reminded me on the drive over, staring out the passenger window at the flat gray October sky.
“You always wanted to stop at every single table,” she said. “I’d have to bribe you with a corn dog just to keep moving.”
“That still works,” I told her.
She laughed. Short and real. Not the polite kind.
What She Wore
She dressed up for it. That was the thing that got me.
Not dressed up like church. Dressed up like she cared. Her good blue cardigan, the one with the small embroidered flowers near the collar. Slacks instead of the sweatpants she’d been living in since the hospital visits started. Her hair was done. She’d put on lipstick, this coral-pink color she’d worn my whole life, the one that made her look like herself.
My cousin Debra pulled me aside in the parking lot before we got the chairs out of the trunk.
“She was up at six doing her hair,” Debra said.
I didn’t say anything.
“She told me she wanted to look nice in case she ran into anyone she knew.”
We both stood there a second, pretending to dig around for the sunscreen.
The Outer Ring
We did the outer ring first. Her pace, which was slow, and we matched it without making it obvious we were matching it. She stopped at a table of old linens, held up a crocheted tablecloth, put it back. She found a brass letter opener and turned it over in her hands and set it down. She picked up a paperback western with a torn spine and read the back cover and put it in her purse.
“Grandma, you gonna pay for that?”
“It’s fifty cents. I’ll leave it on the table when I’m done.”
The man behind the table heard her and waved her off. “Take it. Take two.”
She took one. Tucked it back in her purse like she was hiding evidence.
There was a table of old photographs, the kind people sell when estates get cleaned out. Strangers’ family portraits, school pictures, wedding photos from the forties and fifties. She always stopped at this table, at every flea market, everywhere. She’d pick up one or two and study them.
“Someone should know these people,” she always said.
She said it again today. Picked up a black-and-white portrait of a woman in a nurse’s uniform, maybe mid-thirties, standing very straight, very serious. Grandma looked at her for a long time.
“She looks like she knew what she was doing,” Grandma said.
Then she set the photo down, face up, and moved on.
The Candle Lady and the Record Man
The candle lady was still there. Loretta. She and Grandma had been nodding acquaintances for probably fifteen years without ever learning each other’s last names. Loretta made soy candles in old mason jars and sold them for eight dollars. Grandma always bought one. Always the same scent, cedar and vanilla, because it reminded her of the cedar chest at the foot of her bed.
Loretta saw her coming and already had one in her hand.
“Your usual,” she said.
Grandma paid her. They talked for maybe four minutes about nothing, the weather, a vendor who used to sell hand-painted birdhouses and hadn’t been back since July. Normal flea market talk. The kind that doesn’t mean anything and somehow means everything.
The record man, Don, had a new crate of 45s he’d picked up from an estate sale in Milford. Grandma went through them with one finger, flicking, not really looking, and then stopped.
She pulled out a 45 with a faded blue label. Held it up.
“Ronnie and I danced to this at the Elks Club,” she said. Ronnie was Grandpa. He’d been gone twelve years. “Nineteen sixty-three. He kept stepping on my feet and blaming me for it.”
Don told her to take it.
She told him she didn’t have anything to play it on.
He told her to take it anyway.
She put it in her purse with the paperback western. She was running out of room in there.
The Part Nobody Planned
We set up the folding chairs near the food truck, the one that sells hot dogs and Italian sausage and nothing else, which is the right number of things to sell. Grandma got a hot dog with mustard and relish and a root beer in a paper cup. She ate like she was hungry. She didn’t pick at it, didn’t do the thing where you eat three bites and call it done. She finished the whole thing and then stole two of my fries.
“You weren’t eating them,” she said.
“I was about to eat them.”
“You were talking too much to eat them.”
Debra had gone off to look at some vintage kitchen stuff and it was just me and Grandma for a while, sitting in the folding chairs, watching the crowd. Old guys in baseball caps. A young couple with a baby in a carrier. A man who had to be at least eighty pushing a cart with a ceramic garden gnome in it, very serious, like he had somewhere to be.
Grandma watched him go by.
“I wonder what he’s going to do with that,” she said.
“Put it in his garden, probably.”
“He lives in an apartment. Look at him.”
I looked at him. She was probably right.
We sat there for a while. The wind came up a little, and Debra had been right to bring the extra sweaters. I helped Grandma into hers and she let me, which was its own thing, because she didn’t usually let people help her into things.
“I want you to have the cedar chest,” she said.
Not sad. Not dramatic. The same tone she’d used to tell me the hot dog stand was cash only.
“Okay,” I said.
“The good quilt inside it too. The one your great-grandmother made. Don’t let anyone else get at it.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m not saying I’m going anywhere,” she said. “I’m just saying.”
“I know.”
She reached over and patted my knee twice. That was the whole thing. Two pats. Then she picked up her root beer and went back to watching the crowd.
What She Bought
Final tally: one soy candle, one paperback western, one 45 she couldn’t play, a small cast-iron trivet shaped like a pineapple that she found in the last row for two dollars, and a pair of clip-on earrings that were almost certainly from the 1980s.
She wore the earrings out of the market. Gold-tone, little fans. She clipped them on right there at the table, looked at Debra for a verdict.
Debra said they were perfect.
They were a little much, honestly, but that was also correct.
On the way back to the car, she stopped once to watch a kid, maybe four years old, absolutely losing his mind over a plastic dinosaur his dad had just bought him. Full joy. Arms up. Stomping.
Grandma watched him for a second and smiled. The real kind, not the polite kind.
“That’s the right response,” she said.
Tuesday
The procedure went fine.
It wasn’t nothing, the recovery took longer than they said it would, and there were two days in there where the phone calls got serious and Debra and I took turns sitting in the waiting room drinking bad coffee and not talking much.
But she came through it.
She came home on a Thursday. By Saturday she was asking if the flea market ran year-round or if it closed in November.
I looked it up. It closes the second week of November.
“Then we better go before it closes,” she said.
I told her we’d go.
She still has the 45. It’s on her dresser, next to the candle. She’s not sure what she’s going to do with it. Neither am I.
But she’s got the cedar chest sorted out, and the quilt. Everything is where it should be.
For now.
—
If this one got you, send it to someone who’d understand why.
For more heartwarming (and sometimes heartbreaking) tales, you can read about why my daughter-in-law said I couldn’t hold my grandson, so I rented the apartment across the hall, or even what happened when my boyfriend told me to wear the black dress.
