by Will Walton
“Grandma.” I’m sobbing now. “Is it back?”
“Is what back?”
“Your c—” I nearly choke on the word. “C-c-cancer.”
“Oh, heavens, Tretch.” She grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me toward her. I feel a little stubble from her chin along the back of my neck.
It’s been almost two years since the doctors said she was clear.
“No, Tretch,” she whispers beside my ear. “It’s not back. It isn’t back.”
What? I lift my head and look her in the eyes, everything blurry through my tears. I smile. “Well, good,” I say. Some snot catches at the back of my throat as I try to laugh. But then what’s wrong? What does multiple—?
There are footsteps on the tile behind me, and I turn. Mom stands with hands on her hips. “Tretch,” she says. The expression on her face is soft but serious. “Tretch, why don’t you walk with me to the Christmas-tree room? I haven’t even had a chance to play with the train.”
I look back at Grandma, my eyes drying up so that I can see the wetness in hers. “Yes, how ’bout you go play with the train, Tretch?” She pats my back, and I stand. I feel like I’m about six years old.
“I’ll be back to help with dishes,” I tell her. Grandma smiles. Then I turn and walk alongside Mom down the hallway. She doesn’t speak until we’re at the door of the Christmas-tree room.
“If anyone ever asks me how much your grandparents love Christmas, I always say, ‘Well, they’ve got a room in the house dedicated to it that stays that way the whole year round, if that means anything.’ ”
The room is dark at the moment, except for the Christmas-tree lights. But when Mom flips the switch, the whole room bursts into colorful life. The train set roars, encircling the tree and the presents underneath.
Everything is bright. Everything is festive.
Three plastic Santa Clauses line the far side of the room. They’re each about four feet tall and wear different suits with individual color schemes: one with a red-and-white suit (Classic Santa), one with a white suit with gold trim (Angel Santa), and one with a long green cape and a crown of holly leaves on his head (Recycling/Composting Santa). Grandma bought them as a set. On a desktop there’s a collection of snow globes Grandma and Granddad have gathered over the years—most of them souvenirs from country music festivals—and on the wall hangs a gigantic drawing Granddad did of Santa going surfing. He has fluffy trim around his swim trunks. It used to be my favorite as a kid. I stare at it now. Santa with a slight sunburn on his cheeks. Or maybe that’s just how Santa’s cheeks are—all rosy and whatnot.
Remember how tan Grandma got with the chemo?
A big shelf in the corner of the room opposite the Santa picture holds old photos from earlier Farm Farm Christmases. There’s even one of my dad, nine years old I think, holding up a bright red sweater. He doesn’t look super excited about it, and that always makes me laugh. What would Dad have wanted for Christmas when he was nine? I can’t even imagine, but surely not a bright red sweater. In that same picture, a man sits off in the corner holding a present of his own. He hasn’t opened it yet. And he isn’t smiling or looking at the camera. That man is my great-uncle. Uncle Dennis. It’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of him.
Other pictures are of all of us: Grandma, Granddad, Dad, Mom, Joe, and me. There’s one of Mom and Dad holding up an ornament with the words OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS on it. There’s even one of the two of them in college, visiting Farm Farm for the holidays.
The more I think about it, the more I realize just how much Farm Farm is a part of everything about me. Everything that made me.
I step over the train tracks and jiggle a tiny bell-shaped tree ornament.
“Tretch, what’s upsetting you?” Mom asks.
I don’t turn around. I just keep messing with the ornament. “Something is happening, and no one will tell me what,” I say.
“What do you mean, babe?” She doesn’t sound annoyed exactly.
“Everyone seems … I don’t know … worried or something.”
“Are you worried, Tretch?”
“Yes.”
“What are you worried about?”
“What I saw on that Post-it note on the kitchen table.” I stop jiggling the ornament and turn to face Mom now.
Multiple—
She gives a long sigh. “Tretch—”
“But Grandma said—”
Mom clears her throat. I notice how perfectly still she stands, with her hands in her pockets. “Grandma’s fine,” she says. For a moment she glances up. I think she might be looking at the angel on top of the Christmas tree. “It’s, uh—”
She looks down again. Not at me. Just down.
“It’s Granddad this time, Tretch.”
I shake my head.
No, I think. What about everything? What about how happy we were when Grandma got cleared? What about how two Christmases ago was the best Christmas of them all because we knew we’d be able to have more of them? Many more of them. Many more Farm Farm Christmas Feasts, many more gingerbread-house-building contests, many more viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life and hearing the story of how Grandma once met Jimmy Stewart on a steamboat.
Many more nights sleeping on the floor of Dad’s old room.
Many more card games and cups of coffee.
Many more trips out to Granddad’s shop to see him.
My throat has a cottony feeling. Like I’ve swallowed socks. Like I’m about to choke. I am about to choke. I am choking, I think, and Mom just stands there watching.
“Now, Tretch,” she says, soothing. “It won’t be—”
“Is he?” I don’t know how to ask. My voice rattles. “How long?”
Mom brings a hand to her face. She pulls at the corner of her eye. “There’s no way to know for sure, baby,” she tells me. With the words come tears. “But he’s got time.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a tissue. “They said it could even be a few years.”
I think the tissue is for her, but Mom steps over the train tracks and brings it up to my nose. She smiles as a couple tears slide down her cheeks. She starts to say “Blow” but instead all she manages is a quiet giggle. It takes me by surprise.
And I start giggling a little, too.
Because we both know I’m too old for her to be doing this for me. Holding a tissue up for me to blow my nose.
Well, she is my mom, after all, I think. And we are sad. And who really cares, anyway?
She pulls me close to her and holds me until our shoulders stop shaking, until we are breathing normally again, until our eyes have finally dried.
Granddad is out in the shop again.
I hear the sound of welding as I cross the yard, the winter grass crunching under my feet and the white sky above me. All the trees look dead without their leaves, and there’s no sound of birds or the traffic rolling by on the highway in the distance. All of it’s absorbed by the scratchy echo of the welding, which bounces around on the inside of the shop’s tin walls and swallows me. I have to cover my ears and avoid looking too long at the gold spray of sparks trailing from the welder. “What you working on, Granddad?” I call. He doesn’t hear.
“Granddad!” I yell. “Hey!”
He keeps welding.
“Granddad!”
The spray of burning metal.
“HEEEY!”
Granddad turns around and faces me with the mask again. He slides it to the top of his head. “Heeey, Junior Junior.”
“Whatcha working on?”
He sets the torch down on his carpenter’s table. “Aww, just something for the yard.”
“Cool,” I say. “That’s cool, Granddad.”
“You ’member Mr. Spenks?”
“Yeah! I remember him.” Mr. Spenks is one of Granddad’s pals. He and his sons run an auto repair shop not too far from Farm Farm.
“He’s been getting me into this sculpture business. Got a whole family of homemade welded reindeer in his yard this Christmas.
”
“You making a reindeer?”
“Nope. Pair of wings.”
I check them out and am surprised to find wings where I hadn’t seen wings before. “What for?”
“Thought I’d stick them over on a branch on that big oak out there. They’re angel wings, supposed to be. For Dennis.”
Uncle Dennis? “Oh,” I say. “Well, cool, Granddad.” I decide to file that away for a while, to think about it later. “Oh! Granddad, I meant to tell you! I ran into Mr. Thumb, the man from the 501 Grocery, the other day!”
“Aw yeah? What’s he been up to?”
“Well, he said his wife died.”
Granddad slumps his head, looking at the wing sort of cockeyed. “I’d heard that,” he says.
“But before she did, she made Grandma a scarf. I was supposed to give it to her but I left it at home. It’s a nice one, though!”
“Well, that was very thoughtful,” Granddad says. “Ye-ea-ah.”
I unfold a rusty metal chair and sit down. Granddad eyes the wings. He looks bothered, his eyes all scrunched up and his mouth a straight line. Granddad has really big ears, something I inherited from him. I see some white hairs coming out of one of them and a red line where the strap from the welding mask has rubbed.
Now I have to ask.
“So, Granddad,” I say. “You been feeling all right lately?”
“Hm?” He looks at me. “Yeah, I’m feelin’ good.” He says it like it’s an “of course” kind of thing. “Want to see what I made your grandma for Christmas?” He reaches for an old canvas bag sitting below the carpenter’s table.
“Absolutely,” I tell him. I stand and the rusty chair screeches against the floor. “What is it? You make something?”
“Ye-ea-ah.” Granddad reaches into the bag, and a grin forms on his face. He pulls out a book with a leather binding, a big square binding, but the book itself is thin. It looks like a scrapbook somebody started, then abandoned a few pages in.
He hands it to me, and I turn it in my hands. There are a bunch of swirly designs on the cover that I love. They’re carved into the leather.
I wish I had a phone and could snap a picture and send it to Matt. He would think this was just the coolest.
“Granddad, how’d you do this?” I ask.
“This old thing,” he says. He holds up a tool that looks kind of like the tooth-scraper from the dentist—except it has a cord and a plug on the end of it. “The tip of this heats up and lets me carve into the leather. See, it melts it just enough for me to draw lines.”
“Oh, wow,” I say.
“Smells awful bad while I’m doin’ it, though.” Granddad chuckles.
I flip the book over so that I can see its cover. On the top, Granddad has drawn in cursive, Proverbs 30:18–19. A Bible verse? I think that’s kind of unusual, seeing as Grandma and Granddad never go to church. I never even hear them talk about God. There’s a Bible sitting on the kitchen bookshelf, though, right next to all Grandma’s cookbooks.
“That’s your grandma’s favorite proverb,” Granddad tells me, smiling.
I open up the book. There are only a few pages. The first shows an eagle in the sky, drawn in black ink, with Granddad’s signature at the bottom. I recognize it because I know his drawing style so well. (A picture he drew of a sad-looking clown is up on the wall in my bedroom.) I turn the page, and on the back is a Polaroid, glued on. It’s the same picture, only in photograph form.
“Your grandma took that picture when we was at Yellowstone.”
“Wow,” I say. The next page is another drawing, in black ink. It’s a weird one, I think. A snake on a rock. There’s a Polaroid on the back of it, too. “She take this one?” I ask.
“Nope. That one was me. Took that when I was stationed in Spanish Morocco.”
“While you were in the air force?”
“Yep. Snapped it while I was taking a hike with a buddy of mine.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. I can’t say anything else. The next page is another ink drawing of a ship, a big steamer, with ripples around the bottom to show it’s on water. It’s my favorite one so far. It’s the most detailed. And just like the first two, there’s a matching photograph on the back, this one too old to be a Polaroid.
“That’s the Compton. The steamer your great-granddad captained when we lived in Mississippi. Where I met your grandma.”
“On a boat?”
“Yep. She was a tour guide. I was takin’ a tour.”
“Granddad, this is—” I’m going to say awesome, but I turn the page, and the next picture stops me.
It’s a drawing of my grandma and granddad on their wedding day. I’ve never seen a picture of them so young. They’re holding hands. Granddad looks like Joe in a nice old suit. Grandma has a ribbon in her hair. She’s holding flowers.
I turn the page, but there’s no picture on the back, not for this one. I don’t know what to say. I just have a feeling in my stomach, almost like a sickness, except that I’m not upset. I just think it is beautiful. I think it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I look back up at my granddad.
“This one I had to do from memory,” he says, pointing. There’s water in his eyes, but technically he isn’t crying, because the tears aren’t coming out. Then he blinks a few times and they vanish.
He clears his throat. “So you like it?” He chuckles a little bit more and takes the book from me, closing it and sliding it back into the canvas bag. “I have to keep it out here because, damn, she looks everywhere else!”
“What did it mean, Granddad?” I ask.
“Huh?” He holds the bundle of tarp in his hands.
“The proverb. How did it go with the stuff on the inside?”
“Oh.” Granddad sets the tarp down. “Good question.” He grabs a scrap of paper sitting on his carpenter’s table.
PROVERBS 30:18–19 THERE ARE THREE THINGS THAT AMAZE ME—NO, FOUR THINGS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND: HOW AN EAGLE GLIDES THROUGH THE SKY, HOW A SNAKE SLITHERS ON A ROCK, HOW A SHIP NAVIGATES THE OCEAN, HOW A MAN LOVES A WOMAN.
It makes sense to me. It’s definitely what Granddad has drawn on the pages of the scrapbook.
“Her favorite verse,” Granddad says again. “I fudged a little on the ‘ship’ bit. You see, it’s actually a steamboat.” But it doesn’t matter. I look up into his face, red with either cold or embarrassment, and realize he’s just taught me what I figure to be the greatest lesson in love. I step forward and hug him tight around the waist. He pats my shoulder.
“Can I keep this?” I ask, holding up the scrap with the verse on it.
“Sure thing, Junior,” he says, and I stick it in my pocket.
Granddad spends a minute tidying up his workbench before we make our way across the frosty lawn to the house. He washes his hands with some special soap called Gojo—Grandma calls it “Mojo”—which squirts out in chunky white globs, like cottage cheese, and feels kind of scratchy when you scrub.
When we enter the kitchen, the smell gives me my first notice of the upcoming feast. I know how to identify everything by its smell. Squash casserole (good for summer squash that’s been jarred), a honey-basted ham, a turkey, my grandma’s dressing, peas, and mashed potatoes. There’s even jalapeño cornbread, which Grandma made for the first time at Thanksgiving and liked so much she made it again.
“Spicaay,” Joe says, tasting it after we’re all seated. He chases it with his glass of iced tea, then looks down into his lap. I know he’s checking his phone. Every now and then I see his hand drift down to text Melissa, which gets me thinking about Matt and about how Joe once explained love to me. “Like sparks,” he’d said.
Sparks. In my head, I see Granddad’s welding project, the metallic wings spewing their confetti of flames. I wonder why he wants to hang wings for Uncle Dennis on an oak tree. Then I think, Could that be the tree Uncle Dennis hanged himself from? But why would Granddad want to hang the wings from that? Why would he want to remind himself?
But he’s probably reminded of it already—every time he sees that old tree. Maybe seeing the wings there, attached to it, will give him a better feeling.
“We watching It’s a Wonderful Life later?” I ask. There isn’t much talking going on around the table, with everyone stuffing their mouths with food and lost in thought like I am.
“Oh, of course,” Grandma says. She reaches over and holds Granddad’s hand for a moment, the one that isn’t shoveling food with a fork. Granddad’s a pretty messy eater. He has some potatoes on his upper lip. Sometimes stuff like that kind of grosses me out, but right now it just makes me smile. And it’s good to smile, considering all the things that aren’t being said.
There’s sickness, and there’s sadness.
But the thing is, there’s love, too. I try never to forget that.
I’m thinking to myself, This is the greatest, because of everything I’m noticing: Dad complimenting Mom’s squash casserole, her smiling at him, Joe smiling at the phone in his lap, Grandma wiping Granddad’s face. It’s a feast of love, a feast of sparks.
My mind can’t help but return to Matt.
I sit later in my dad’s old room holding Joe’s iPhone while he takes a shower. I backspace in the search bar where he typed multiple myeloma earlier and now type in, what happens when you fall in love?
I select the first search result on the screen. It links me to an article. I read my answer in a whisper. “ ‘A mild form of obsession.’ ”
I tap back into the search bar. “Okay,” I say. “One more try.” There’s no real short way to ask the question, and it takes a couple tries before I finally come up with: i’m gay. how do i fall out of love with my straight best friend?
“Whatcha doin, Tretch?”
I jump, dropping Joe’s phone onto the bed. I didn’t hear the shower turn off.
“Ohh, just searching something.” I pick up the phone again and quickly click out of the search. “Nothing important, though.”
“Did I get any texts from Melissa?”
“I don’t think so. Nothing popped up.” I toss the phone to him. He holds it in his palm and stares. He blinks a couple times, then asks, “You ready to go watch It’s a Wonderful Life?”