Part 3 — Steve The Crab
Owen cried into my shirt for a long minute, and I held him until Marlene reached the doorway with the shoebox against her chest. She was a small woman in a straw hat, out of breath from the stairs. She said, Mrs. Hale, I am Jakes mother. I think we have been told two very different stories about each other.
We sat at my kitchen table with the box between us. She untaped the lid slowly. Inside were thirteen greeting cards, each addressed to me in Marlenes careful hand. Birthday cards, a get-well card when I had my knee done, and a sympathy card on the anniversary of Lonnies death. Every one was unsent.
Marlene said Kristen had asked her to hold them, years ago. She had said I was fragile and that contact from another grandmother would upset me. She said I preferred to be left alone. Marlene believed her. She had held the cards at the bottom of her closet and wondered each year why I never wrote back.
I told her the other half. For six years, Kristen had told me that Marlene found me overbearing, and that I should give them space. I took every word to heart. I made store-bought cakes and left early and stayed home for weeks. We had both been protecting a grandchild from a woman who, it turned out, wished only to be her friend.
Two grandmothers can live twelve miles apart for years, held in separate silence by the same sentence.
Kristen and Jake had come up the stairwell by then, sheepish and wide-eyed. Jake had learned the truth in the car. Marlene had asked him point-blank who had paid for the beach house, and he admitted that he did not know, because Kristen always told him it was her savings. Kristen sat down on the bench by the door and wept.
She said she had been ashamed. Her husband was between jobs, and she had wanted desperately to look like she had it together in front of his family. Each month, a little more of my money went into the story. Then it became easier to say I was difficult than to say they could not afford to host. She said she was sorry in the plainest terms.
I had one condition, and I said it gently. The payments stay stopped. Jake would take over the rent on the beach house for the week, using a payment plan that he arranged with the owner that same afternoon. The family would sit down with a counselor from Kristens church to make a budget. I would come to supper on Sundays, and bring nothing but a pie.
Jakes side of the family left at the end of the day, kindly, and with a promise to return. Marlene stayed. She and I sat on my balcony until dark, in Lonnies deck chair and a folding one, drinking sweet tea. She told me about the husband she had lost, and I told her about the flounder. By eleven, we were laughing like schoolgirls.
Owen spent the whole week with me. We built a sandcastle with a moat, and a crab named Steve was invited to live in it, although he declined. On Friday, the whole family came, Marlene included, and ate my lemon pound cake on the pier. I wore the sand-dollar earrings, and nobody asked me to sit anywhere else.