My name is Nora Whitfield.
I’m seventy years old. I’ve been raising my granddaughter, Ellie, by myself since we lost her parents three years ago.
My daughter, Lisa, and her husband, Tom, died on Interstate 70 on a Saturday night in October. A car accident, the police said. That’s what I tell people. That’s what it says in the obituary. Died in a car accident.
That’s all I’ve ever told anybody.
Ellie was four. She was in the back seat. She lived.
I don’t talk about that night. Not to anybody. Not to my pastor, not to my neighbors, not to the grief counselor the hospital made me see for six weeks. I put it in a box in my heart and I nailed the lid shut.
I’ll tell you why later.
We live in the old house on Pickett Street in Harlan, Missouri. The house where my husband, Hank, and I spent forty-one years of our married life. A little white two-story with green shutters and a front porch that sags in the middle like a tired horse.
Hank built that porch in 1979. He was always going to fix the sag. He died in 2019 before he got around to it. Heart attack, in the garden, pulling weeds. I found him lying between the tomato plants with his hat still on.
The house is too big for an old woman and a little girl. The furnace is older than I am. The roof leaks. There’s a blue plastic bucket in the corner of Ellie’s bedroom that catches the drips when it rains. She named the bucket Gerald. When it rains at night, she lies in bed and counts the drips. “Gerald’s thirsty tonight, Grandma.”
I live on Hank’s Social Security and a small pension from my thirty years as a school secretary. It isn’t much. It was enough for two old people. It isn’t enough for an old woman and a growing girl.
Some months, I have to choose between filling my prescriptions and buying Ellie new shoes.
I always buy the shoes.
I cut my heart pills in half to make them last. Dr. Patel would yell at me if she knew. She doesn’t know.
But that little girl has never once complained.
Not when her sneakers got so tight her toes curled. Not when we ate peanut butter sandwiches for dinner four nights in a row at the end of the month. Not when her friends all went to the water park for a birthday party and I couldn’t afford the twenty-dollar admission.
“That’s okay, Grandma,” she said. “I don’t really like water parks anyway.”
She loves water parks.
She is my sunshine. She’s the only reason I get out of bed some mornings.
