The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.
I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.
Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.
I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.
So I called Duncan.
She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.
She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.
She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.
So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.
I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.
The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.
I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.
I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.
She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.
Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.
Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.
A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.
At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.
I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.
And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.
That was the last time I saw her.
I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.
She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.
David Willis 