And from that day on, Dell told anyone who would listen that I had jinxed it, that I had walked into his dream with my pencil and my opinions and put a curse on it.
He seemed to believe that a woman who reads the whole document is somehow responsible for what the document says.
“Faith reads things,” he told people at parties. “That’s her whole personality.”
In 2017, he started Pickett Outdoor Services, mowing lawns in summer and plowing driveways in winter.
It did better.
In 2018, he hired Todd as operations manager.
I was glad at first.
Then I noticed that my son’s paycheck had Dell’s signature on it, and that Todd had started agreeing with Dell about things he used to laugh at.
A man will forgive you for a lot.
He will not easily forgive you for being right.
Jolene Pickett was 66.
She had frosted hair, a laugh you could hear from the parking lot, and a firm belief that she was the fun grandmother.
For a while, she was.
I never competed. I’m not built for it.
Then, in the spring of 2023, Elsie’s fourth-grade class entered the school district’s essay contest.
The topic was “The Grandparent I Admire Most.”
Elsie wrote about me.
She wrote about the swing set and the spelling words and how I let her use the good calculator.
She wrote that I notice things nobody else notices and never make a big deal about it.
She won.
The Peyton Ledger printed the essay on page three with a photo of Elsie holding a certificate and grinning with two missing teeth.
I learned later that Jolene had already told her women’s group at church that Elsie was writing about her.
She’d said it at coffee hour two Sundays in a row.
Then the newspaper came out, and six women in a church basement read my name instead of hers.
Jolene never said a word to me about it.
She didn’t have to.
From that spring on, she called me “the essay grandma.”
Always with a little laugh, always in front of someone.
She took the kids to the trampoline park, bought them slushies the size of their heads, and made sure everyone knew who the fun one was.
And Thanksgiving was her stage.
Twenty people, two turkeys, one deep fryer, and Jolene in the middle of it all with a microphone voice and no microphone.
I understood it in a way.
She was a woman who had been embarrassed in front of her friends by a ten-year-old’s homework.
That would sting anyone.
But Jolene never forgave a newspaper.
And she never forgave me for being in it.
And then there was Brandy.
My daughter-in-law was 40 that year.
She worked as a service coordinator at a car dealership out by the interstate, which meant she spent her days telling tow truck drivers where to go.
She was good at it.
She was efficient, organized, and she never said please to anyone she didn’t need something from.
For the first ten years, Brandy and I were polite, not close.
And polite is fine.
Polite is how a lot of good families work.
Then came February of 2022.
Todd and Brandy had a fight, the kind that ends with someone packing a bag.
Todd showed up at my door at eleven at night with a duffel and the face of a boy who had broken a window.
He slept in my guest room for eleven nights.
I didn’t take sides.
I made him eggs every morning.
Every morning, I told him the same thing.
“Go home and talk to your wife.”
On the twelfth day, he did.
Brandy never saw it that way.
In her mind, I had kept him.
I had given him somewhere soft to land, and that had made it easier for him to leave.
She never said this to me directly.
She said it to Todd, who repeated it to me two years later at Russell’s funeral as if it were an apology.
After that, her texts changed.
“Pickup moved to 2:40.”
“Archie needs poster board. White, not yellow.”
“Elsie can’t have sugar today.”
No hello, no thanks, no question marks.
Six years of Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and I could count on one hand the times she’d said thank you, and I’d still have fingers left for a fork.
Brandy texted me the way she dispatched tow trucks.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
The kids were the point.
The kids were always the point.
I believed that right up until November.
That Thanksgiving had a second event attached to it, and you need to know about it.
Brandy’s younger sister, Morgan, was getting married.
Morgan was 34, with a four-year-old son named Bodie and a fiancé named Eric Vickery, who sold commercial insurance and had very nice manners.
They had booked an adults-only resort outside Tulum, in Mexico.
The wedding was Wednesday, December 3rd.
The whole Pickett family was flying down the day after Thanksgiving.
I wasn’t invited, and honestly, that seemed right to me.
I was the bride’s sister’s mother-in-law, or whatever the word is for that.
I don’t expect to be at everyone’s wedding.
I sent a card with a check in it and wished them sunshine.
But the dates did something to me.
Russell and I were married on November 17th, 1979.
For our 45th anniversary in November of 2024, we had booked a cruise.
Seven nights in the Caribbean. Balcony.
He’d circled the dates on the kitchen calendar in red pen and drawn a little boat next to them, badly.
He died in March, and I canceled in April, and the woman on the phone was very kind about the refund.
That evening, after Todd’s visit, I went to the hall closet and took down a round box from the top shelf.
Inside was a straw hat with a wide brim and a navy grosgrain ribbon.
Russell bought it for me in Key West in 1991.
