into the bank in Astoria with a withdrawal slip with my name on it in his handwriting, and Mrs. Ekstrom at the window knew him since he was a little boy and never thought twice. And when I asked him about it, he told me I'd given him permission. He told me I'd forgotten. He sat me down at my own kitchen table and held my hand and said, Gramma, we talked about this, don't you remember, you said I could, you're getting so forgetful lately, it scares me. And for a little while I believed him." She looked at me. "Do you understand? For about a week, I believed I was losing my mind."
"Did you tell anybody?"
"Who? My sister Signe in Ilwaco. She's eighty and deaf as a post and she thinks Darrell hung the moon. Pastor at Knappa, who also thinks Darrell hung the moon, because Darrell put a new roof on the parsonage last year for nothing." She almost smiled. "He's very good with people, my grandson. He always was. Even when he was little. He could make a grown-up do anything just by looking at them. He made you bring him whipped cream."
The Coast Guard boys were getting up. I should have gone to the register. I didn't move, and after a second I saw Irja look down the room at me with her mouth in a straight line, and then come out from behind the register and take their check herself.
"He told the man at the feed store I'd started wandering," Edna said. "I found that out last month. He told the pastor. He told the girl who does my hair. He's telling everybody, very sadly, how his poor gramma is getting confused, how she says strange things, how she imagines people are stealing from her. So that when I say a single word, everybody will already know what to think of it." She touched the photo strip with one fingertip, just at the edge, as if it were hot. "And then this summer he started bringing your girl around. Ardith. No. I'm sorry. Jodie."
The name in her mouth went through me like cold water.
"She's lovely," Edna said. "She helped me shell peas on the porch in August. She told me all about her little brother and his baseball cards, and about you, how you've worked so hard. She calls you Mom like it's a whole sentence. And I watched him with her, and it was Longview again. All of it. The way he picks out her clothes for her. The way he tells her who her friends are. The way he talks about her mother." She stopped.
"What does he say about her mother?"