Dr. Grind nodded in agreement. It seemed useless to try to keep the two parties separate any longer. He stood and then made eye contact with some of the parents, who had managed to wrangle and hold back the other children, before waving them over. The rest of the children came running, holding their cards like tickets to the greatest event in history.
“Lord have mercy,” Mrs. Acklen said, smiling, slightly shocked, as the children approached her. Cap, in the lead, now seemed suddenly shy, as if his card was not actually worth of all this fuss. “You have something for me, sweetie?” Mrs. Acklen asked him, and he handed the card to her and then looked down at his feet. “We all have cards!” Marnie shouted. “They’re beautiful!”
Patricia helped Mrs. Acklen open Cap’s card, a watercolor of a giant, Godzilla-size woman assembling a skyscraper. “What’s this, now?” Mrs. Acklen asked Cap. “It’s you,” he said quietly. “You’re making our house for us.”
“I love it,” Mrs. Acklen said. “What’s his name?” she asked Dr. Grind, who nudged Cap and the boy replied, “Cap.”
“I love it, Cap.” She gave him a hug, which made Cap smile, and he slipped away from the crush of kids, a dazed look on his face. One by one, the children handed their cards to Mrs. Acklen, who delighted in each one, especially Jackie’s picture of a stick figure shooting dollar signs from her hands into the open mouths of little-kid stick figures. “She’s busted it down to the bare essentials,” she told Dr. Grind.
Patricia took the picture from her grandmother and frowned. “It’s a little crass, though, even for a kid, Gramma,” she said. Brenda Acklen waved off her granddaughter. “Patricia is a little skittish around children,” she said to Dr. Grind, who could only nod. Patricia looked slightly sheepish and then shrugged. “They’re very unpredictable,” she admitted, as if she were talking about the stock market or tigers kept as pets.
When it was all over and the kids had been introduced to Mrs. Acklen, Ally returned to the table with another card that she had just made and handed it to Patricia. “What’s this?” Patricia asked. “Another card for Gramma?”
Ally shook her head. “It’s for you,” she said. “So you can have a card, too.” Patricia opened the card and then thanked the girl; Ally then ran back to the other children to play. Mrs. Acklen, watching the whole thing, announced that she was quite certain she had made a wise decision to fund this project. “These darn kids are so sweet, it makes you want to cry,” she said, and Patricia nodded. Dr. Grind reminded himself to secretly give Ally a very expensive toy in the near future.
That evening, as the parents prepared the children for bed, Dr. Grind met with Mrs. Acklen and Patricia in his office. He and Kalina and Gerdie had spent almost a week creating a PowerPoint presentation as a last-ditch effort in case Mrs. Acklen decided to pull the funding and shutter the project. He turned his computer screen toward them and started the presentation. The project’s revamped logo, a M?bius-strip-like design of stick figures holding hands, started to slowly spin on the screen, and Mrs. Acklen waved her hands as if surrendering just before a battle began. “Dr. Grind, I am so darn tired. Those kids wore me out, and I hardly even stood up. I just want to get back to the hotel and sleep and then get back to Knoxville. You do not have to sell me on anything else. I’m in. I’m still doing this. You have the full funding and the project will continue.”
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Acklen.”
“Mere formality. I had decided as much almost immediately after the project started. I know you’re doing something special here, Dr. Grind. I had a vague idea of what I wanted, but you’ve taken it much further than I ever anticipated.”
“Thank you, again.”
Patricia then motioned to Dr. Grind and said, “But I would still like to look over this information, just to see exactly how the money is distributed and, if you’d like, I could offer my own suggestions from an outsider’s perspective.”
“Of course,” Dr. Grind said.
“I’m so happy, Preston,” Brenda said, smiling. Dr. Grind was about to thank her when she continued. “The problem, unfortunately, is that I am dying,” she said, not even the slightest change in her voice, the most beautiful and calm assertion of her own mortality. “I’ve got cancer, quite a bit of it, and it’s going to be awful.”
“Gramma, it’s going to be okay.”
“Well, I have enough money that I might survive, but it’s going to be awful either way. If we’re being honest, Dr. Grind, I probably won’t survive till the end of this project.”