Love Letter

My grandmother had thick, straight hair when I knew her. It never took a perm, so she kept it short, in a choppy pixie cut. Her hair was iron gray from far away, but up close I could see strands of silver, white, and black side-by-side like interwoven threads.

Her hair was the first thing I noticed as my parents' big boat of a car, their yellow Chevrolet Impala, pulled into the driveway next to her apartment late on a Friday night. She leaned on the doorknob, holding the door open for us, the kitchen light spilling out into the night and making her hair gleam like moonlight.

Small, tired me pushed my weight hard against the Impala's heavy door until I felt its weight catch on its fulcrum, opening up to the Texas night and into my grandmother's country of cicadas whirring in mesquite trees and profligate stars sprinkled like crumbs across a deep velvet sky.

I raced my brother and sister to the door, wanting to be the first one my grandmother leaned down towards and wrapped in her arms, the first to be enveloped in a cloud of spicy Jovan Musk perfume and the lingering scent of sweet powder she patted in a cloud between her breasts.

My little sister with her long braids was my grandmother's Little Raggy Doll. My older brother was "mijito." In between them, I was loved and petted but without a pet name.

My grandmother was famous in her small town, or so it seemed to me. When we went to the Piggly Wiggly with her, or to shop for clothes at the Terry Farris, people would stop her. They would tell her how much they loved the hamburgers she used to grill and the milkshakes she made at the drug store's soda fountain.

A few times before it closed she took us to the soda fountain for a special treat. When she stepped through the double glass doors, people in the booths turned to look.

"Barbie! Barbara! Barbarita!" they called out.

She ushered us to a table of her former customers and introduced us proudly. "Estos son mis nietos."

In that moment I knew she loved us, that she felt intense pride just for the simple fact that we existed. Inside her small apartment, we got on her nerves, played too loudly, argued too much. But there in the drug store, when she told her friends that we lived in the big city or that I made straight A's, she was free to express her joy in our accomplishments. I blushed with embarassment, but also a secret sense of happiness for that knowledge: the sweet knowledge of a grandmother's love.