J. Jance: Payment in kind

“Your grandfather had a stroke two years ago,” my grandmother was explaining unnecessarily, “so he doesn’t talk much. I always told him you’d come someday, didn’t I, Jonas? I told him I wouldn’t go against his wishes and go looking for you, but that if you ever came here…”

She reached up with the hem of her apron, and wiped her eyes. It’s hard to think of a wrinkled old lady in terms of radiant, but her transparent skin fairly glowed. In her aged features I caught echoes of my mother’s much younger and almost forgotten face.

Laboriously the old man lifted one hand and began making mysterious motions with it. He seemed to be drawing a square in the air.

“Oh,” my grandmother said. “You want me to get the box?”

There was an almost imperceptible nod from the man in the chair. The old lady bustled out of the room, leaving the two of us to examine each other in thick silence.

When she came back, she was carrying a box, an old-fashioned hatbox. It was so full that the cover wouldn’t quite shut. The corners were held together with tape so old that it had turned brown and brittle.

She put the box on the dining room table and then came back and pushed the old man’s wheelchair over to the table.

“Well,” she said to me. “Are you coming or not?”

Obediently I followed them to the table and sat on the chair she indicated, watching with fascinated attention as she removed the cover from the box. It was full to the brim of newspaper clippings. The last, only three days old, was a P.-I. article discussing my court appearance as the investigating officer in a drive-by shooting.

For the next several hours we went through layer after layer of yellowing, crumbling paper. It was like an archaeological dig through my life. My grandmother hadn’t discriminated. It was all there, good and bad, honor roll listings the few times I made it as well as some of the occasional snide remarks from Maxwell Cole’s column. It included a picture, yellowed and poorly printed, of my winning basketball shot in the Queen Anne High School gym years before. At the very bottom of the stack was an even-longer-ago shot of me and two other dazzled cub scouts shaking hands with Smokey the Bear.

Looking through that box of clippings was a peculiar and humbling experience. All those years when I was feeling sorry for myself because I was so alone, because I didn’t have a family like other kids did, somewhere in Seattle a little old lady was hunched under a lamp, clipping newspapers and carefully hoarding whatever tidbits she managed to glean there.

Just thinking about it made a huge lump grow in my throat.

My grandmother fixed lunch for all of us. Patiently she fed thick, hearty soup to the old man before she ate her own. I stayed until three o’clock in the afternoon.

When it was time to go, my grandmother walked me out onto the porch. She stopped on the top step, and seemed to be searching for words. For a woman who had talked nonstop all day, I was surprised when she grew strangely quiet.

“Your grandfather and I grew up in a different world,” she said finally. “Your mother was headstrong, willful. He wanted the best for her, wanted her to live by his rules. She wouldn’t. She defied him, and he never forgave her for that. There was a terrible quarrel. He vowed to never let her set foot in this house again, and she didn’t. You see, your mother was every bit as stubborn as he was.”

She paused for a moment and wiped at her eyes with a corner of her apron. I recognized the gesture as another echo from the past. My mother used to do the same thing.

“I never went against your grandfather’s wishes. That wasn’t my place, so I never saw your mother again, either, but I did start keeping my box. My treasure chest, I call it. Two years ago, right after his stroke, a nurse pulled it out from under the bed and asked him what it was. I was afraid he’d make me get rid of it, but instead, he wanted me to read the stories to him, show him the pictures. Since then, he’s wanted to look at it almost every week. Thank you for coming today, Jonas. It’s an answer to my prayers.”

With tears in my own eyes, I hugged her, held her close, then left her standing there on the porch. As I drove away, what had happened long ago between my mother and my grandfather no longer seemed important. A heavy but invisible burden had finally been lifted off my shoulders.

Lars Jenssen is right. Forgiveness is a two-way street. And it’s good for you besides.