A Tough Nut to Crack

by Tom Birdseye

  Dad turns the key. There is a whining sound, the kind Quinton loves to make, then something like a burp, and the engine rumbles to life.

  The gears grind and complain. So does Dad. “Don’t see how this rickety thing could be legal.” But Esmerelda finally starts to roll and—like it or not—we’re bouncing out of the barnyard.

  Grandpa Ruben’s driveway is long, and lined on either side by big, leafy trees and stout stone fences. Which are actually pretty cool, as far as fences go—no mortar, just flat rocks stacked so carefully on top of one another that they don’t fall down. It looks old, really old. I wonder who did the work.

  Can’t think about that now, though. There are so many potholes Dad can’t weave around them all, and it makes for a bumpy ride.

  We hit one the size of a refrigerator. It jars us so badly the glove compartment pops open. Inside there is all sorts of stuff: a stubby pencil, some nuts and bolts, two Snickers wrappers, a bunch of wadded-up receipts, one grease-stained work glove, a crumpled Dr. Pepper can.

  And that’s just the top layer. I reach in to see what’s underneath, but Dad says, “Cassie, mind your own business.”

  Which, again, is not like him. To set him straight I consider quoting Mom: “Never be afraid to look beyond the obvious.” Because that’s what I was doing—looking beyond the obvious—trying to find out more about Grandpa Ruben.

  Just the thought of Grandpa makes me queasy, though, so I keep my mouth shut. Besides, Dad doesn’t like to talk about Mom. I close the glove compartment, twice. Do you have to slam everything around here? Guess so. I let out a big sigh, so Dad will know he’s being weird.

  Dad acts like he doesn’t notice. He’s listening to another of Quinton’s made-up “facts,” this one concerning the speed of light: “Two hundred thirty gazillion miles per second, which is really, really fast!”

  Unlike Esmerelda, which is really, really slow. She moves like a slug in mud. Still, we’ve finally made it to the end of the drive and are pulling out onto the paved county road. Dad gives Esmerelda lots of gas. The speedometer creeps higher. Hot air streams into the windows. It makes me wish for a cool Oregon breeze. Be patient, Cassie, I say to myself. The sooner we go see Grandpa and get it over with, the sooner we go back home where we belong.

  A man in a newer truck passes us and waves. Quinton says, “He probably thinks we’re Grandpa, huh?”

  Dad shrugs. “Maybe, but not necessarily. It’s just what folks do around here—wave.”

  Quinton starts flapping his hand at every car we see. Sure enough, everyone waves back.

  It’s only a mile or so before we come to the edge of Macinburg, Kentucky. “Population 10,388,” the sign says. We pass a Wal-Mart, a shopping center, neighborhoods, and a gas station with a billboard out front that says, “Sam told me to change this sign, so I did!”

  Quinton waves at a woman pumping gas. She waves back. We turn right onto a side road, cross some railroad tracks, and swing into the Macinburg General Hospital parking lot.

  Dad shuts off Esmerelda. He pulls himself up real straight, like a soldier getting ready for battle, and takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says, and we march up the sidewalk and through the automatic sliding doors.

  It takes a few minutes of waiting at the front desk, but finally we are directed to the fourth floor. Once there Dad points to a row of chairs and says, “You kids wait here. I want to get some information. This may take awhile, so sit tight, okay?”

  We say okay and watch him walk over to a big counter, where he starts talking to a nurse. I can’t hear what she says, but I can pick up that she has an accent just like Vicki Higgins’s.

  Quinton catches it, too. He says, “You know why people in Kentucky talk the way they do?”

  This isn’t a question. It’s just Quinton, letting me know that Mr. Know-It-All is about to start lecturing again; more “facts.” Too bad my brother didn’t come with an ON-OFF switch; I’d duct-tape it in the OFF position.

  “It’s because they eat so much Kentucky Fried Chicken,” he says.

  I can’t let this one slide. “No it’s not. My humanities teacher, Mr. Taylor, loves Kentucky Fried Chicken, and he doesn’t have an accent. People here talk like they do because this is the South and people in the South have Southern accents.”

  Quinton shakes his head. “Dad’s from the South, and he doesn’t have a Southern accent.”

  “That’s because he moved away a long long time ago. He’s lost it.”

  “No,” Quinton says, “that’s because he teaches English at the high school, and they won’t let him talk like that.”

  But I’m not listening. There is a strange noise coming from down the hall. “Woo-hoo!” Like a train whistle … kinda, sorta, maybe, ish. I’m trying to figure out what might be making the noise, when Quinton notices it, too.

  “You know what that is?”

  “No, and neither do you.”

  He starts to protest, but we both are on our feet by then, walking toward the sound. My shoes squeak on the polished tile floor. I go up on tiptoes to quiet them. Because there the sound is again—“Woo-hoo!… Woo-hoo!”—louder now.

  We ease around the hallway corner and can really hear it. “Woo-hoo!” It’s coming from that room there. We creep up to the door and peek in. A stout old woman with curly white hair sits, propped up in bed. She’s got a deck of cards and is flicking one after another backhanded at an empty bedpan at her feet, trying to get them in the pan’s hole.

  “Woo-hoo!” she says.

  The old woman has hit a bull’s-eye. Her face lights up like the Fourth of July. I can’t help but smile, too. She looks like the kind of grandma I read about in books, or see in holiday TV specials—funny, and full of good stories, and nice.

  Yeah, really nice, and always there for her grandkids, no matter what. And … well, cool in a grandma-cool sort of way, the kind of chocolate-chip-cookie-baking, storytelling, you-can-stay-up-as-late-as-you-want, perfect grandma every kid needs. Just seeing her there laughing in her hospital bed gives me the sudden and powerful urge to run up and hug her. Although I don’t. It’s not okay to run up and hug strangers, no matter how much you feel like it.

  “Woo-hoo!”

  She’s hit another one. She laughs and claps her hands, then reaches up and pulls her curly white hair off and tosses it in the air.

  It takes a second for me to realize that it’s not actually real hair, but a wig.

  Then another second to see that she’s not really an old woman, but an old man.

  An old man who’s now looking our way. “Woo-hoo!” he hollers and grins from ear to ear.

  That’s when it hits me. My mouth falls open, and I gasp. It’s been a while, but I remember every detail of the photo I found tucked in the back of Dad’s dresser. It’s of a younger man, with more hair, and not nearly as wrinkled. Still, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. That is Grandpa Ruben Bell.

  5. RC Cola and a Moon Pie

  “You’re so pretty I only need one eye to look at you,” Grandpa Ruben says to me, then winks. To Quinton he adds, “And you, my good man, are as rough-and-ready-a-looking kiddo as I’ve ever seen!”

  When we don’t react, just stand there dumbstruck in the doorway, he waves the wig in the air. “Don’t worry. It’s all right. This is fake, but I’m not. Your grandpa just can’t resist a little joke, that’s all.”

  Quinton gawks up at me. Evidently he didn’t nose around in Dad’s dresser looking for photos like I did. “That’s Grandpa?” he asks. “Really?”

  I’m still in shock—I was expecting a tractor-flattened version of the boogeyman, not a cuddly old guy who could pass for Santa—but I manage to nod.

  Grandpa laughs. “Yep, really.” He flops the wig back on his head, then off again, then on. “What do you think? Do I look better with or without? Vicki Higgins gave it to me. She said I didn’t have enough hair of my own, which is true. Gave me some Moon Pies, too.”

  “Moon Pies?” Quinton asks, edging in
to the room.

  “Yep,” Grandpa says. “Marshmallows squeezed between graham crackers, then coated in chocolate. Yummy stuff. Vicki Higgins brought me a half dozen to munch on. And an RC cola, of course. Can’t have a Moon Pie without an RC cola.” He grabs a plastic bag from the bedside table and starts digging around in it. “I drank the RC, but got several Moon Pies left. Y’all want to try one?”

  Before I can blink, Quinton is at Grandpa’s side, tearing open a clear wrapper and biting into a round Moon Pie. “Yum!” he says.

  Grandpa Ruben chuckles and gives Quinton a hug and a kiss on the forehead. “Want a sweet treat, too, Miss Cassie?”

  I consider the Moon Pie Grandpa Ruben is holding out. And the kindness in his blue eyes. And the warm, good-natured grin. And the gentle hand on Quinton’s shoulder. And my head swims.

  A part of my brain is pointing out in no uncertain terms that everything is moving way too fast and I should be very careful. This is, after all, the man that my father—a great dad if there ever was one—has disowned.

  The rest of my brain, though—and the voice of my mom, there at my shoulder—is arguing just as strongly that I should relax and trust my heart. Because my heart is telling me—no, yelling at me—that not only do I want a Moon Pie; but much much more than that, I also want a hug and a kiss on the forehead, just like the one Quinton got.

  From my very own grandpa.

  As if he can read my mind, Grandpa Ruben says, “You have no idea how happy I am to finally meet you.”

  The next thing I know, I’m across the room, throwing my arms around his neck. He hugs me back and gives me a kiss on the forehead.

  From that close I see happy tears in his eyes. Which gets me watery, too. For a second I’m sure we’re both going to start bawling like in a sappy movie, and that would be okay. I happen to like sappy movies.

  But then Quinton says, “Did you know that caramel is made with bee barf?”

  The laugh that bursts out of Grandpa Ruben is the big, openmouthed, throw-back-your-head-and-let-it-loose kind. Which makes me laugh, too. Which gets Quinton going. And in seconds we’re all laughing so hard we have to hold our sides.

  Finally Grandpa Ruben recovers enough to say, “Why no, I didn’t know that. But do you know what you get when you cross a bear and a cougar?”

  Quinton gets his breath back and ponders the question for a moment. As much as he hates not knowing everything, or I should say pretending like he does, he finally shrugs. “I give up. What do you get?”

  “A booger!” Grandpa Ruben says, and we all let loose again.

  So it goes. Odd bits of wacky Quinton made-up trivia: “The nearest relative of the panda bear is the hippopotamus.”

  Goofy Grandpa Ruben jokes: “Where do cows go on Saturday nights? To the moo-vies!”

  A bit of leg pulling from me: “It rains so much in Oregon we don’t walk to school, we snorkel. We don’t tan, we rust!”

  Which sets off a string of questions from Grandpa. What is it really like in Oregon? More important, what are our lives like there? He wants to know everything from A to Z.

  In return we get the lowdown on the tractor incident. “Like a fool, I wasn’t paying attention,” Grandpa explains. “Hit a bump and fell off, simple as that. With no one in the driver’s seat, the old John Deere took the opportunity to teach me a lesson, then made a break for it. Vicki’s house was the roadblock.”

  His injuries, thank goodness, are not nearly as bad as everyone first thought. “Sure, I’ve got a bruised kidney and a cracked rib, and am mighty sore, even with the painkillers they gave me. But the docs are ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure there is no internal bleeding. Plus I got a new hip out of the deal.”

  “A new hip?” Quinton says. “Wow!”

  Grandpa grins like he just won the lottery. “I’ll say!” He explains how a surgeon took out the entire top of his right leg bone and put in a man-made replacement, complete with the fancy joint part. “Superglued the old and the new together, no kidding! They’ve already had me up and walking twice this morning. Amazing, isn’t it? A regular who’d-a-thought-it!”

  We talk about what it’s like to be in the hospital: “Very inconvenient,” says Grandpa. “The nurses are always checking on me, then talking about me like I’m not in the room. Then they wake me up in the middle of the night to ask if I’m in pain.”

  He chuckles. “I got them back, though. Told them I’d been doing dance aerobics with a TV exercise show. Is that okay? Then I unplugged the heart monitor and played dead. Haw! You should have seen their faces!”

  “Go, Grandpa!” says Quinton.

  Grandpa shakes his head. “They’re still one up on me, though. They make me wear these dang hospital gowns that open in the back instead of the front. Must have been designed by Seymour Butts.” He elbows Quinton. “Get it? See … More … Butts?”

  We all laugh again. Quinton wants to know when Grandpa can leave. Grandpa shakes his head. “Gotta stick around a few more days for ‘observation.’ Doctor’s orders. Still, I sure would love to be home this very minute.”

  We gaze out the fourth-floor window at his farm in the distance: “Over there,” he says, “is the road you came into town on, and those lines of trees are on either side of my driveway.”

  We follow his finger as he points out each detail. “And there is my house. And my garden. Boy-oh-boy, do I miss those fresh veggies. And there with the shiny tin roof is the barn. Across that pasture is the only bit of farming I still do these days—my wheat crop. See it shining golden in the sun? Isn’t it beautiful? It’s small, only a couple of acres, sown every year in honor of your grandma Chrissy.”

  Oh, yeah, Grandma Chrissy. Dad carries an old yellowed photo of her in his billfold. She died when he was little. Poor Dad. He lost his mom, then his wife. That’s a lot of hurt, twice as much as mine. No wonder he’s so quiet about it. Thinking about Grandma and Mom makes him too sad.

  Me, I’m just the opposite. I like thinking about Mom. When I do, it’s as if she’s here with me, walking alongside me, giving me advice, helping me figure things out, like a guardian angel.

  Grandpa smiles, and I can tell he’s remembering Grandma Chrissy. “She loved to bake from scratch,” he says, “and insisted that the best bread came from the best grain—hard red winter wheat. I still plant in the fall, the same way we always did, with a hand-cranked seeder. The wheat sprouts, then goes dormant and winters over. Come spring it takes off again like a caged bird set free. It’s a sight to behold. A bit of cultivating keeps the weeds down. By June it’s got kernels, which are at first pasty, then crunchy, and finally ready to harvest.”

  “I like bread,” Quinton says.

  I nod. “Me too.”

  Grandpa pats both our hands. “Lordy, how I wish your grandma were alive today to meet you two. She’d give you both the biggest hugs in the whole wide world!”

  Just him saying it and I can almost feel Grandma Chrissy’s arms around me, soft and warm, but strong, too. I’ve never thought of a wheat crop—or any kind of crop for that matter—as beautiful. But now, looking out the window at it and thinking about why Grandpa planted it, I have to admit that he’s got a point. “It’s beautiful wheat, Grandpa.”

  “Really beautiful!” says Quinton.

  Grandpa Ruben grins from ear to ear. “Woo-hoo!” he says, and plops his wig on top of Quinton’s head.

  “Woo-hoo!” Quinton says, and dances around the room, holding his half-eaten Moon Pie in the air.

  I join in, too, dancing and waving my Moon Pie, and thinking, This is perfect, while Grandpa Ruben claps his hands in delight.

  “Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!” we all are singing, when Dad walks into the room.

  6. A Tough Nut to Crack

  Silence falls like a hammer. Quinton and I lower our Moon Pies and look back and forth between Dad and Grandpa, who are eyeing each other the way most people do pit bulls.

  Grandpa finally nods and says, “Hello, Harlan.”

  Dad n
ods back, barely. “Hello.”

  There then follows two minutes of the most meaningless conversation—if you could call it conversation—I have ever heard. Two adult men, father and son, moving their mouths, wagging their tongues, using words to say … nothing. Nothing about the tractor wreck. Or Grandpa’s hip. Or the not-so-minor fact that they haven’t seen each other in just about forever, much less written or talked on the phone. Or why. The topic of discussion is—tah-dah!—the weather.

  “Hot today.”

  “Yep, Weather Channel says it’ll hit ninety-three.”

  “Like a steam bath with this humidity.”

  “Tomatoes will be stewing on the vine.”

  “That’s hot, for sure.”

  “Mmm-hmm, hot indeed.”

  The longer this nonsense goes on, the more I can’t believe it. How can Dad—the same guy who dances with me in the kitchen, and has endless patience with Quinton—how can he just stand there, like he’s talking to a stranger?

  And how can Grandpa—who only seconds ago was hugging and kissing and laughing and telling jokes with Quinton and me—how can he suddenly be so grim-faced and steely-eyed with his one-and-only son? I’m just about to shout, “What is it with you two?” when Dad says, “Well, I guess we’ll head back out to the farm and make sure everything is okay. Let’s go, kids.” And just like that he’s walking out of the room.

  As if I have no mind, I fall into line like a good little girl and follow Dad and Quinton into the hall.

  Where I finally wake up and screech to a halt. No, I am not leaving without at least trying. No way, no how. Mom always said, “Never be afraid to ask the hard questions.” I wheel and march right back into Grandpa’s room and just blurt it out. “What happened between you and Dad?”

  The surprise on Grandpa’s face lasts only a second, then it’s gone, replaced by a look I can’t read. “Did you know,” he says, “that the best chocolate chip cookies are made with real butter?”