They were both smiling.

David opened the card.

I watched his face while he read it.

I watched it change. Very slowly. Like something was caving in behind it.

He didn’t say anything. He just handed it to me.

Inside was Oliver’s uneven handwriting, in green marker. The letters were big and wobbly. Some of them were backwards. He’d pressed so hard that the marker had soaked through the paper in places.

Happy Birthday, Grandma.

I wish I could be little again so you could hold me like before.

I still love you.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, because I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

I wish I could be little again so you could hold me like before.

At dinner, he’d been sitting at that table with this card in his backpack. Waiting. Waiting for the cake to be over so he could hand his grandmother a picture of the very thing he thought he’d lost.

And then she’d made twenty people laugh at his body.

I looked over at Oliver.

He had curled onto his side while we were reading. The little green dinosaur with the missing eye was tucked under his chin. Gerald was squished against his back.

His eyes were closed.

I don’t know if he was really asleep. I think maybe he just didn’t want to watch our faces while we read it.

David sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed. He took the card back from me and laid it on his knee and pressed it flat with his whole palm, smoothing out the fold, over and over.

“I thought she was just teasing him,” he whispered.

“He told you he was hurt, David.”

“I know.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“I kept telling him she loved him,” he said. “Over and over. Like that would fix it.”

“Maybe he didn’t need you to tell him she loved him,” I said quietly. “Maybe he needed you to show him that you believed him.”

David nodded slowly.

He kept looking at the drawing of the little boy in the blue shirt.

Later that morning, while Oliver was having more blood drawn, David and I went down to the cafeteria. Neither of us ate anything. We just sat at a little table by the window with two trays of untouched eggs.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

He looked up.

“When you were little,” I said. “Did your mom ever say things about your body?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I was a chubby kid,” he said finally. “Did you know that? Up until about twelve.”

“I’ve seen the pictures.”

“She used to call me her little dumpling.” He laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. “In front of people. At church. She’d pat my stomach and say, My little dumpling. And everybody would laugh.”

“Did it bother you?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” He pushed his eggs around with his fork. “I remember once, at Christmas, I cried about it. In my room. And my dad came up and sat on my bed and told me Mom didn’t mean anything by it. He said she just said things without thinking, and it would hurt her feelings if I made a big deal of it.”

He stopped.

I watched him hear himself.

“Oh,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s exactly what I told Oliver.”

“Yeah.”

He put his fork down.

“Her own mother was worse,” he said. “Grandma Ruth. She used to tell Mom she’d never get a husband if she didn’t lose ten pounds. Mom told me that once, laughing about it. Like it was funny.” He rubbed his eyes. “I guess everybody in my family’s been laughing about it for seventy years.”

“That’s my old chair,” she whispered. She touched it with one fingertip. “And there’s Biscuit, look, with his whiskers.” She laughed a little, a wet laugh. “And that’s my Teddy Bear.”

“Read the inside, Mom,” David said.

She opened it.

Her mouth moved silently while she read. I watched her get to the second line.

I wish I could be little again so you could hold me like before.

She stopped.

Her lips stopped moving.

She sat there in the plastic hospital chair, not looking away from the page, for what felt like a very long time.

“He made this for me?” she said finally.

“Yes,” David said. “Yesterday afternoon. He worked on it for two hours. He was going to give it to you after cake.”

Patricia touched the little drawing again. The boy in the blue shirt.

“I used to read to him there,” she said. “Every Saturday. He’d fall asleep on me before we finished the book. Every single time.”

“Then you started telling him he was too big,” David said.

“He was getting older, David.” Her voice got defensive. “He’s seven. He’s heavy. My back isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t think…”

“You told him,” David said, “that he had a pregnant belly. At your birthday dinner. In front of twenty people.”

Her face crumpled.

“I was joking,” she said. “It was a joke. Everybody laughed. I never thought he would take it like this.”

“He thought you didn’t want to hold him anymore.”

Patricia looked up at her son.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I love that child. I love him more than anything in this world.”

David crouched down in front of her chair, so that his face was level with hers.

“Then why,” he said quietly, “did he think he had to become smaller to get his grandmother back?”

Patricia stared at the card in her lap.

She opened her mouth.

She closed it again.

For once in her life, she didn’t have an answer.

 

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