“Never you mind that boy. You should go on to college. Don’t worry about me.”
“I already deferred the grants and the scholarships for this year, so I can’t. Besides, money wasn’t the reason I decided not to go.”
“Hush, child. I’ll do well enough on my own. Our groceries are delivered, as is the propane. Anything I want”—she snapped her fingers—“I can have it delivered out here anytime. In fact, having to do more for myself will be good for me. I’ll get more exercise and grow stronger. Never mind those scholarships. Go talk to Mr. Browne in town. He can work it out.”
“Mr. Browne? The mysterious man in town who sends us money and pays the bills?” Regretting my snarky tone, I added, “Sorry, Gran.”
“He isn’t mysterious at all. He worked for Grand and me, and now he works for me and you. He can advise you. He’ll tell you how much we can afford.”
“Are you talking about going into Grand’s savings? College is very expensive.”
“We can sell off land or the timber. Though,” she muttered, “I don’t hold with selling off the timber.” She added, “But land. We have a lot of that, and we can part with a few acres for your future. I should’ve insisted before. In fact, I’m going to give Mr. Browne a call. Let him know what we’re thinking, and then you go talk to him.”
“No.”
“I mean it, Hannah. I know your grandfather handled all this sort of stuff, and I’ve never stepped up and taken on the responsibility, but I’m serious this time.”
“So am I. It’s too late. I’d have to reapply by certain dates and get accepted and all that. Plus, I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“Never mind me. Selfishly, I wanted you here with me, so I let it be when you said you were putting off school for a year. But you need this. I see it now. If it’s too late for this coming school year, then we need to get cracking for next year. Or what about midyear? Can’t you start between semesters? You’ve got time to work it out, and we’ll talk to Mr. Browne and find out how best to proceed.”
We were connected to the world by our landline. Here, in our beautiful, homey Hollow, we had no cell reception. That yellow phone on the wall was our link to the outside world, and it brought in both good and bad news. A few days after Spencer’s phone call, Gran said she spoke to Mr. Browne, but she must’ve done it while I was out in the pottery cabin or working outside otherwise. With Gran tied to the house, as she was by her physical limitations, there was never an opportunity for me to communicate privately via phone, unless I left home and drove somewhere.
In the end, I didn’t go to see Mr. Browne. Very soon, other things came up to interfere with the plans we thought we needed to make. I was reminded of something Grand had often said. He’d quoted Proverbs with all the fancy wording of the King James Version, but he’d said the message came down to one certainty: “Man plans; God disposes.”
When I suspected I was pregnant, I didn’t tell Gran. I could be wrong, and there was no sense in getting us worked up over something that might not be true. And there was no point in taking those tests from the drugstore. Either I was or I wasn’t. It wasn’t as if I needed to know by a certain day. I preferred not to think about it. Instead, I spent longer hours out at the potter’s wheel. It was the only place I could hide from Gran without raising questions. She might be old, and her body was worn out, but her senses were sharp.
One morning in September she made me face the truth. I was fixing breakfast, and she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her coffee to cool. The bile was rising, and I tried hard to think the nausea away, but my stomach was determined to betray me. As I scraped scrambled eggs onto her plate next to the toast but not touching it—just the way she liked it—Gran confronted me.
“You’re paper white. You think I’m old and don’t know, but I do. Tell me the truth. Is it the boy you were dating? What’s his name? You only ever called him by his first name. Who are his people?”
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about, but any moment now I was going to lose what little I’d eaten that morning. I pressed my hand to my midsection and tried to breathe evenly.
“You don’t need to know his name. He’s gone. Out of the picture. This is on me.” My stomach lurched.
“Gone? What does gone mean?” Her voice rose on each word.
My coffee and toast were abandoned as I flew to the sink and hovered there. So far, so good. Nothing had come up, but it was a near thing. I clutched the counter and answered her.
“He’s not in the picture, that’s all.”
“What about college, Hannah? And a baby . . . a baby is a gift from God, but babies should have daddies in their lives.”
“I didn’t. Not a mother or a father. I had you and Grand. You were more than enough.”
Gran shook her head, her face full of worry and misery. She rubbed her cheeks, then said, “It wasn’t a choice. Nobody wanted it that way.”
A tear wet her cheek. Tears always happened when I mentioned my dead parents. She couldn’t bear to speak of them. Next, her body would start shaking, and she’d cry in earnest. I went to her and wrapped my arms around her.
I whispered, “He’s a boy, Gran. Not a man. The last thing we need is a grown child to take care of. We’re better off without a boy who doesn’t want to be here and doesn’t want to be an adult.”
Her body shuddered in my arms, and she gripped them with more strength than I could’ve imagined was left in her scrawny hands. “We don’t have Grand anymore. Just you and me. Two women. One too old and one too young. How on earth . . . what in heaven’s name are we supposed to do?”
“Hush, Gran. You’re right. A baby’s a gift. This baby is a gift from heaven, sent to comfort us for all we’ve lost.”
She patted my back. “You have to do the right thing, the honest thing. Hard as it may be, Hannah, that boy, whoever he is, has a right to know. It’s right for his family to know. A baby should be celebrated and loved, not hidden.” She paused and pulled back, her eyes open wide. “Unless he’s a criminal or sick in his head or . . .” She covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders quaked.
A criminal? For heaven’s sake. Where had that come from? I kissed her forehead. “No, Gran, he’s a foolish boy fresh out of high school with no good sense and no proper home training.”