Jenna told me over the telephone, from her duplex in San Angelo, the thing she had carried for three years, and her voice shook so hard that I held the receiver in both hands. “Grandma, the night I took Grandpa medicine, he asked me to. He was in so much pain, and the hospice nurse had gone home, and the dose was not enough. He called me into the room at two in the morning, and he said, Jenna, you are the only one in this family who is not afraid of me. Please help me. I took the pills from the cabinet and I gave them to him myself.”
I sat down in the kitchen chair in Abilene, eighty one years old, with the telephone against my ear, and I could not speak. For three years I had believed that my granddaughter stole from a man in a hospice bed. I had told her never to come back. “I did take some for me, too,” Jenna said, softly. “That is true. I was using, and I was ashamed. I let you think I had taken it all for myself because it was easier than telling you Grandpa begged me. He made me promise on the Bible not to tell. I have kept that promise for three years.”
I put my hand over my eyes. Leon had been a proud man, a rancher who would never admit that he hurt, and he had asked the one grandchild in the family who could not say no to him. “Baby,” I said, finally, “come get me Saturday.” I put down the telephone. Out in the pasture, the wind turbines turned slowly in the evening light, and I sat there until dark, thinking of a girl of thirty one standing in the door of a bedroom with a bottle of pills in her hand.
A spare room offered over the telephone gave one grandmother the Saturday to bring her granddaughter back to the family in San Angelo.
I gave my terms on Saturday morning, standing on the porch of the ranch house with my suitcase, when Jenna got out of her little blue car. “Jenna, I am not here because I am broke. I have never lost the farm. I told all of you a story to see who would answer, and I should not have done it. But you answered, and so I will tell you the truth about everything. I want you to hear that I am sorry for what I believed. And I want you to know that I would have done the same for Leon, if I had had the courage.”
Jenna came up the porch steps and stopped a foot from me. She was thin and sunburned, with her hair pulled back and her eyes red, and she looked like Leon around the jaw. “Grandma,” she said, “I am nineteen months clean. I did not call because I thought you would never want to hear it. The first thing I did when I got sober was to sit in my kitchen and cry about Grandpa. I have been trying to be somebody he would not have to be ashamed of, and I did not know if you would let me.”
We were still holding each other on the porch when a silver SUV came up the long drive in a cloud of dust, and Tyler, the lawyer from Dallas, climbed out with a leather briefcase. Brooke had called him. He had driven six hours to talk me out of moving to San Angelo, he said, and to put things in order. He crossed the porch, saw the folder of deeds and the farm papers on the swing, and lunged for them. “Grandma, let me hold these,” he said. He snatched the folder and bolted for his car.
He got as far as the cattle guard. Mr. Ortiz, the neighbor of Jenna, a retired Marine of seventy two who had driven out in his truck that morning to carry my suitcase, stepped out from behind the gate and planted himself in the road, with a hand up and a look that could have stopped a tank. “Counselor,” he said, “I think the lady would like her papers back.” Tyler stopped, and slowly turned around. Mr. Ortiz did not touch him. He just stood, and waited, as quiet as a post.
Tyler walked back up the drive with the folder against his chest and held it out to me. His ears were red. “Grandma,” he said, “I came for the wrong reason, and I know it. I am slammed this month. I was slammed last month. I have been slammed for ten years.” I took the folder. I kissed him on the cheek. Then I told him that the farm was worth two point seven million dollars and that every one of my grandchildren would be provided for, and that Jenna would be provided for first, and he nodded. The money consequences were simple. The two point seven million dollar farm stayed with me, paid off, in a trust for all four grandchildren. Jenna received her share first, and I told her not a dollar of it would ever be given to a person who asked for it in the dark. Tyler apologized and went home. Brooke wept on the telephone. Caleb sent a hundred dollar check with a note that said, Praying for you, and I put it in my Bible, where it still is.
In the name of Leon, who passed in 2021, I started the Leon Thornberry Fund. It pays for hospice comfort care, pain relief and respite for families, and for treatment for those in recovery, in Taylor, Jones and Callahan counties. In the first year we helped fifty two families through the last weeks of a loved one. One was a ranch wife of seventy from Anson who had slept in a chair beside her husband for three months. She slept eleven hours in a real bed the night the respite nurse came.
Jenna moved into the big house on the ranch in the spring, and on the first morning she came out onto the porch in her bare feet with two cups of coffee. We sat on the swing and looked at the pasture, where the cattle moved slowly through the mesquite. She did not say anything for a while. Then she said, “Grandma, I think Grandpa is glad.” I looked at the turning turbines on the ridge. I took her hand. And I said, “I think he is, baby. I think he is.”