Traditional Gravity

by Stephen Armstrong

Chapter Three

  Less than ten minutes later, I drove up the long, familiar gravel driveway. The shutters on the house had changed from red to blue, and the longstanding white birch on the front lawn did not make it through the winter. Everything else appeared the same. Nothing momentous happened here - only my life. I lived there from the day I went home from the hospital to the time I left for college. And I came there enough during my college years and after that I could use this physical space as a touch point for every significant memory of my existence.

  I hesitated briefly before getting out of the car. I had not been home since Christmas. Christmas was only four months ago, which didn't exactly make me the prodigal son. It was a long time for me though, and the last visit to my parents' house ended on a very sour note. I bit the bullet, got out of the car, and approached the sliding glass door in the back of our house.

  My mom happened to be coming out at the same time. We both froze when we saw one other.

  "Evan?" She posed the question like she hadn't seen me in years and could scarcely recognize me. "What are you doing here?"

  "I heard Grandpa was sick, so I came home."

  "I take it you talked to Jordan?"

  "Yeah, last night."

  She moved a few more steps toward me and gently but firmly wrapped her arms around me.

  "How's Grandpa?" I asked, pulling out of her embrace.

  "Not good. I'm actually going back over there now. The doctors think this might be his last night. But we've been here before."

  We had been there before. As a diabetic, my grandpa experienced recurring problems with infections. Each time an infection came, the medical staff prepared us to say goodbye, yet each time he bounced back.

  "Here, I'll drive you." I might not have been on good terms with her, but couldn't justify treating her coldly, at least not that night.

  "How's life?" my mom asked, as we settled into my car. Having a routine conversation seemed odd when her father and my grandfather was dying.

  "It's fine." Three more specific questions loomed if this was going to be a typical dialogue. The questions were always the same, and possessed the same effect on me every time.

  "How's your work going?" She always asked me this first.

  "It's okay - nothing new."

  I worked as an administrative assistant in a headhunting firm. I interned there during college, and after graduation, they offered to take me on full time. I did the easy thing and took it. The job paid well enough for me to survive without any difficulties, and even save some money in the process. However, I worked in the same position I held as an intern in college. Every higher position that opened during my tenure was filled out of house, leaving me spinning in place. There hadn't been anything new to report about my career in a long time.

  "Any new women in your life?" Question number two.

  My last relationship had unraveled a little before Christmas. If Wendy and I held on a little longer, she might have made it to my parents' house, but it wasn't to be. Of course, there was Samantha.

  I squirmed a little in my seat, feeling very conflicted. Part of me wanted to stonewall every attempt Mom made at talking to me. For the last four months I bitterly concocted numerous passive aggressive tactics to exact a small measure of revenge. Now that I sat face to face with her, I couldn't follow through. It seemed cruel to heap more misery upon her as her father lay on his death bed.

  “Kind of," I finally answered. I wasn't close to forgiving my mom, but enacting a cease fire in my cold war against her wouldn't kill me.

  "Really? What's her name?" My mom's eyes didn't exactly light up, but she was intrigued.

  "Her name is Samantha Rodgers. She's actually from Oleout Plains - I just ran into her in town."

  Once again, Samantha’s name elicited a blank stare. I didn't really expect my mom to know her.

  "She was two years younger than me," I explained, before she could ask. "She's the granddaughter of the Rodgers, who live down the road."

  That fact didn't place Samantha for my mom. The houses on our road were spread out, and my parents didn't know many of their neighbors well.

  "I don't remember her - was she a friend of yours?"

  "Not really. But I had a crush on her for a while."

  "I don't remember you ever talking about her at all," my mom commented.

  "I didn't really talk about that stuff back then."

  Jordan and I did discuss such matters, but I didn't tell him about Samantha either.

  "Anyway, we got together for a cup of coffee."

  She proceeded to ask me the standard questions. What was she like? Where did she work? What did she look like? I satisfactorily answered each query in turn.

  "She sounds good so far," remarked my mom. I had not provided nearly enough information for Mom to approve of her, though Samantha being a teacher helped; my mom taught kindergarten for many years. I also withheld the most important potential detail - Samantha might have had a child. "Did you have a nice time?"

  "We did. I really enjoyed talking to her." I smiled a bit recollecting it. Whatever uncertainty Samantha's rumored pregnancy had produced earlier effectively faded away as I recalled our time together.

  "Do you think you'll go out with her again?"

  "Maybe; we’ll see. I mean I'm only here for a week, and she lives a long ways away."

  "Your father and I would like that - it might get you home more if you started seeing her."

  My mom wanted what every parent did - for their grown-up children to come home more often, and for everything to be all right in their lives. Dating Samantha might have fulfilled both of those wishes.

  When it became apparent we were done talking about Samantha, I braced myself for the third question - whether I was going to church or not. This question lay at the heart of our dispute last Christmas, and led to the single worst thing my mom ever said to me.

  Miraculously, this time the third question never materialized. Instead, my mom lapsed into silence. I seized the opportunity to change the subject. Meeting Samantha temporarily distracted me from delving further into the random memory from my grandparents' church, which I still needed to unpack.

  "Hey Mom, was there ever a time in high school that we went to Grandpa and Grandma's church for something?" I felt weird asking the question, given how it seemed to come out of nowhere.

  She looked at me perplexed. "Maybe - I don't know. Why?"

  "On the way back home, I kept thinking about this time that we went to their church. Grandma was singing in the choir. We had hamloaf afterwards."

  "Hmm. Your grandma sang in the choir a lot of weeks. Hamloaf? We haven't had that in ages," she answered. My mom's memory wasn't the greatest, so it was always a crap shoot to quiz her on something particular. "Maybe for Easter one year, I think."

  Perhaps the Easter connection, alongside my grandfather's declining health fully explained why this memory percolated to the front of my mind. At any rate, my mom clearly couldn't recall what specific year we were there. I would need to find some other way to uncover who I was searching for that day in the church.

  Our conversation broke down. We missed Jordan. Jordan always possessed so much more to share from his life, and unlike me, carried no obstructions in his relationship with Mom. Usually when we visited our parents, Jordan carried the first hour of conversation. Besides that, it just wasn't really home until he got there too. Without him, we were conspicuously incomplete.

  However, our exchange in the car was the most we had talked since Christmas. For the first time in the last few months, I started to think maybe we could be okay. Still, I couldn't forget what she had said and suspected she would never take it back. Maybe we could never go back to okay.

  When I actually saw my grandfather, I believed that it would be his last night on earth. He looked so frail. My grandpa used to be a rugged man - a World War II soldier, a farmer, and then a factory worker. His body always looked the part too - even in his later years. Now he labore
d to breathe; his skin appeared thin and almost transparent. An IV attached to his arm pumped in medication that would take the edge off of his discomfort, but never heal him. He seemed more unconscious than asleep. I could only conclude his last words had already been spoken.

  Grandma stood up from Grandpa's bedside, alternately embracing my mom and me. Her red eyes brightened as she smiled at me. She touched my cheek and told me how handsome I looked.

  "I've just been sitting here, talking to him. I don't know if he can hear me, but in case he can, I didn't want to leave him alone now," she explained to us, visibly holding back tears. As his wife of nearly seventy years, I suspected she would have had a lot to say to him. Or maybe there was nothing left to say after all of that time.

  "Why don't you get something to drink Mom, and take a break. We'll take over for a little while," my mom offered with a concerned tone.

  At first, I didn't think she would leave. Finally she said, "Well, I guess I do have to use the ladies’ room. And maybe it would be good if I stretched my legs a little."

  She ambled out of the room, leaving us alone with my grandfather. I had never stood next to someone who was dying before. If my mom ever experienced such a moment, it hadn't been with her father.

  "Why don't you say something to him," she suggested.

  "I'm not sure what I should say."

  "Just tell him what he means to you."

  What did my grandfather mean to me? I didn't enjoy a strong emotional connection with him. We never talked about girls or anything of substance. Maybe he didn't do that with anyone. There was quite a bit I didn't know about his life. He was a prisoner of war, but seldom opened up about that experience. From what my mom told me, the war greatly affected him for years afterwards, and altered their entire family dynamic. Perhaps his ability to make a lasting connection to his grandkids had been one of the unnumbered casualties of World War II. Or maybe he simply came from a generation of men that tended to talk very little of the inner workings of their souls.

  However, he was a significant part of my life. He had been present at every Christmas, most of my Thanksgivings and many of my Easters. We went on vacation with him, took numerous fishing trips and played Pinochle more times than I could recall. He was my only living grandfather, and I would never get another one.

  I could have said all of that to him. Instead, I recalled our fishing trips and some of my other memories of him.

  "I'm going to miss fishing with you," I told him. Our last fishing trip happened well over a decade ago, and I didn't even bring my pole on that occasion. "We never did catch much, but it was always an adventure letting you pick the fishing spots."

  My grandfather was infamous for choosing out of the way places to fish. We used to pass numerous parking areas right along the road winding around the Pepacton Reservoir, only to stop somewhere we couldn't even see the water. One time, we even needed to tie a rope to the car so we could scale down the steep bank to the water below.

  "And I'm going to miss playing Pinochle together too." Again, I hadn't played that card game in a number of years - sometime before he went to the nursing home. Pinochle was a staple of my mother's family gatherings. The seemingly inscrutable rules that governed the game bored me as a kid. My grandparents didn't have cable, so eventually I gave in and learned how to play. Participating was better than sitting in the living room with my father, counting down the minutes until dessert would be served.

  "Although it was never a good thing when we ended up being partners," I observed. Grandpa didn't twitch or move. If he could have heard me, he would have smiled. Sooner or later, he always ended up as my partner, and dragged promising hands into the hole. I think my grandfather secretly enjoyed this, even if it cost him the game.

  My mom laughed softly behind me. Up until that point she had just been a silent spectator during my reminiscences.

  "You two certainly had a knack for pulling each other down during those games," she agreed. "But that was really sweet that you said all those things."

  I nodded absently, searching for some kind of response from my grandfather. None came.

  "Evan, why don't you step outside for a few minutes - I need some time alone with your grandfather."

  "Sure." I moved out from in front of her and walked toward the door. My mom silently observed my grandfather as I closed the door to his room, waiting until I was gone to utter the regrets, affectations, or other last words she wished to convey.

  I didn't feel overly sad walking away from Grandpa, which seemed like a horrible thing to think. I suspected my feelings had less to do with any emotional disconnect toward him, and more to do with the time he spent in the nursing home. Really, we had been saying good-bye to him for three years. At first, Grandpa went to the Nursing Home to recover from pneumonia and a foot infection. He never recovered enough strength to live at home, and my grandmother lacked the physical capacity to help him get around the house. His chair remained empty at the dining room table during Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner. Then his memory became cloudy, and his mind lost its sharpness. Sometimes he knew people, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he could follow conversations, sometimes he couldn't. He slowly lost whatever interest he had maintained in life. Then his health eroded further. We watched him go into the hospital, only to come out of it a little later, but never the same. It had been one goodbye after another - a goodbye to fishing trips, pinochle games, and holiday celebrations. There was only one goodbye left now, and it had mostly been said.

  Grandma returned. "Mom just wanted to say something privately," I said as we waited outside for her to finish.

  Just then, she opened the door. "You guys can come in now," she said, wiping some tears from her eyes.

  We stayed for another hour until visiting time ended. My grandmother decided to stay the night in his room on a fold-out couch, in case it really was his last night. Mom offered to stay, but Grandma insisted that we should go home.

  "My mother and father never slept in the same room, even fifty years ago," my mom remarked as we left. I cast one more look back at my grandma sitting next to my grandpa, and struggled to wrap my mind around how seventy years of marriage came down to one night in a nursing home.

  We were mostly quiet on the way home. Finally, my mom said softly, "I just want you to know that I love you."

  I met her gaze and nodded.

  "My father never really said that to us, and it always left me wondering a little bit. I thought that he loved me, but I wasn't really sure. I don't want you to feel the same way."

  "I know you love me Mom."

  We said nothing more the entire way home.

  Back at our house, we assembled in our living room with my father.

  "No chance he'll recover like he did the last time?" he asked my mom.

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. He looked so frail. It's hard to imagine that he could bounce back from this. But, after all the times before, who knows? Dad is one tough cookie."

  "He sure is," my dad echoed.

  "Do you remember the first time you came to take me out, and Dad opened the door?" The sadness in her face lightened into fondness.

  "Yup."

  "He looked at you, and then barked, "What do you want?" You said your name, then he said, "I know who you are!". He slammed the door in your face, and then never even told me you were outside. The only way I even knew is because I happened to hear from upstairs."

  My father didn't smile, but he looked wistful. I never heard about such an encounter between Grandpa and him before. Many more previously unknown tales from Grandpa's life were bound to be unearthed in the days to come.

  "Your dad certainly was intimidating."

  Mom glanced at the clock. "Well, there's nothing to do now but wait. I guess I'll head to bed." She turned to my dad. "Are you planning to hunt your skunks again?"

  “Skunks?" I asked.

  "Yeah, your dad has been chasing down skunks in the middle of the night in his truck."
/>   My father seemed proud.

  "Why?"

  "Cause they tear up the lawn at night looking for grubs. So I figured I needed to do something to scare them off."

  Jordan liked to refer to my father as a ‘White-collar redneck’, or sometimes a 'renaissance redneck’. He was a Cornell educated architect who read all kinds of intellectual books for fun. A quick scan of his book shelves yielded a number of weighty titles that most people couldn't have even attempted to understand. Yet for all of his intellectual pursuits, he loved NASCAR and enjoyed shooting at things. I was fully convinced my father could have made a lot of money working for a major architectural firm somewhere bigger than Oleout Plains. Apparently small town life suited his tastes better. The open spaces of upstate New York gave him ample room to ponder the complexities of life while he also enjoyed the simpler things.

  "I could actually use your help," he said. "You could drive the truck while I hold the shotgun - it's a little tough to do both at the same time."

  The proposition mildly interested me, if only to witness the spectacle. "What time do you go out?"

  “Two or three in the morning."

  "No thanks." I wasn’t if sure my dad invited me on the skunk hunting expedition as a joke, or because it was a subtle overture to have the two of us spend more time together. Honestly, the pending passing of my grandpa coupled with my mom's reaction to it made me consider the latter option. But I didn't feel like staying up until the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps one day I would regret not doing so.

  "Well, try not to crash into a pole this time," my mom warned him.

  "You ran into a pole?"

  "No, not quite."

  We always figured my dad wouldn't die from natural causes.

  Mom bid us good-night, and left my dad and I alone in the living room.

  "How long are you planning to stay?" he asked.

  "I guess through Easter, depending on what happens with Grandpa."

  "Hmm. I didn't think we'd see you for Easter this year," he said, subtly referring to my blow-up with Mom. This was as direct as my father would ever get.

  "Well, I'm here."

  I didn't know where my dad stood on my disagreement with Mom. Most likely he felt the same way as she did, but my dad's thoughts and feelings tended to be opaque. He was the quintessential 'man of few words’. Some said he was this way because his side of the family naturally possessed quieter dispositions. Jordan conjectured that Dad hated saying things that were obvious. Due to his superior powers of reasoning and quick analytical processing, everything seemed obvious to him and therefore he said very little. I don't know if Jordan's hypothesis was valid. Dad gave us such little evidence to work with, that any attempted insight into the workings of his mind was purely speculative.

  Assuming Jordan was right about my dad, there was a lot he would never say in a moment like this. He would never discuss the inevitability of death, or the sadness that my mom and the rest of the family would feel with Grandpa's passing - all of that was too obvious. However, it seemed to me there was much that was not self-evident about this moment. The question I pondered most was, what did my grandfather's life mean? He lived over ninety years, fathered four children, but what did any of that mean? Perhaps my father knew. Either way, we didn't speak of anything else that night before the silence sent us each our own way.

  Later, I settled into my old bedroom, which had been turned into a library for my mother. Among the hodgepodge of childhood items occupying the closet, I located my collection of mixed tapes. I searched for one to fall asleep to. After locating a promising candidate, I placed it in my old stereo and laid down on the bed. A melancholy acoustic guitar ushered in Cracker's "Another Song About the Rain?”. It wasn't raining out, but the somber tone of the song fit the mood of the day.

  For the duration of the tape, I mulled over the meaning of my grandpa's life. I couldn't be sure if seeing my grandma sitting next to my grandpa highlighted the true purpose of life, or if it demonstrated the absurdity of everything. They had faced the years together, and in the end, she was there to stand next to him. However, their time together couldn't ultimately hold back the tide of death, and the chord of his life would be severed regardless of their love for each other. Death could have stepped in any number of years ago - only chance had given them this long.

  The tape came to an end and the play button snapped up. My mind pressed on, finally finding Samantha sometime approaching midnight. It now felt like days since I saw her - or at least a different day - even if it had only been nine hours ago.

  As I contemplated whether I should call her or not the next day, the phone rang. I looked to the clock next to my bed - 11:59 PM. No good phone calls came after 10 PM; I could guess the nature of this call. After a few minutes someone knocked against my door.

  "Come in," I said.

  My dad, illuminated by the hall light, appeared at the door.

  "Your grandfather just passed away," he announced respectfully.

  The clock turned to 12:00 AM. Monday was over.