On Our Hands

Ten months, two weeks, and one day ago, on a clear cold day in late October, I set my plastic cup of cocoa down carefully on the Formica tabletop by the window of the ReddiStop, lowered myself to the bench, pulled off my windbreaker, and stuck my cane under the table where even I couldn’t worry that anyone else would trip on it. Taking three deep calming breaths, I rested my hand on the cross necklace under my blouse and looked outside.

Sadie Krebs picked her way gingerly down the Maple Street sidewalk, towed along by the humongous dog she’d rescued. I told myself not to go apologize again for having possibly re-traumatized the dog by smacking it across the muzzle the day before—I wouldn’t have done that if I’d seen it coming a ways away and had time to think, but I didn’t have time; I was trying to pick up the book I’d dropped, and the first thing I knew its teeth were approaching me at eye level. Sadie knows I’m scared of dogs. After all these years she probably also knows that I’m scared of doing the wrong thing, and the fear sometimes pushes me into doing the wrong thing.

Inside, Starla chatted up some kid I didn’t know at the counter. Starla caught my eye over the kid’s shoulder, and I gave a thumbs-up to reassure her (and myself) that everything was okay. Then I hauled the laptop out of my backpack (yes, at seventy I am wandering around with a backpack like a high school kid; it’s the best way I know to manage errands without a car and with a cane), woke the screen up, and let myself check my email.

There was a message from my great-niece Sarah, headed Aunt Gloria, I read your letter to the editor… and another from my great-nephew Allan, headed Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Sarah and Allan—they’re cousins, not brother and sister—don’t write or speak to each other any more, or even attend the same family gatherings. We used to complain about them heckling each other all through Thanksgiving dinner. Then in 2016 Sarah stormed out, leaving her turkey wing half-eaten, and didn’t come back, and since then they’ve taken turns showing up to all-family events, which is not exactly a relief.

I opened the newspaper—the real newspaper I’d bought from Starla along with my cocoa, not the web page—and read over my letter to the editor. They’d messed up the commas, but the words were still mine.

I’d written, like most of the other people on the letters page that day, about the race for county sheriff. We’d had Roland Granger for the past twenty-some years; I didn’t care for his smarmy manners or his occasionally erratic grammar, but so far as I knew there was nothing really important wrong with him, and anyway he hadn’t had much competition. But that year Sam Pickett was running against him, promising to get tough on illegal aliens and not put up with our state’s sanctuary policies. Pickett and Granger both had their main rallies in the other end of the county, where most of the money and the people