by D. G. Driver
The road turned parallel to the water, and I saw all the reddish log cabins. There were about twenty of them, all identical to one another, with nifty little front porches filled with rocking chairs. I noticed that some of the cabins looked like they had covered hot tubs out back. It seemed like a cozy place for a family trip. There was a small dock out in the water that I guessed all the renters were supposed to share, and the pebbled beach was wide and ready for families to set up chairs and picnics.
Down at the far end, this small beach gave over to the woods again, and that was where the one cabin that was different rested. It was not a log home in a neat, spiffy, cookie-cut design. This ranch-style place was a little longer than the others, the logs rough and gray with age. Pretty flowers lined the front windows to each side of the wide front door, which was inviting and showed that someone lived there. However, I couldn’t see a path to the front door, making me suspect that Grandma didn’t want the tourists in the nearby cabins to come knocking.
My parents turned into the gravel driveway that sliced a wide grassy yard in half and followed it until it curved behind the house. The gravel drive faded into a rocky, overgrown backyard marked with a dozen or more trees. It struck me as weird that Grandma kept the front yard so neat and trim, while the backyard looked avoided. Maybe it was difficult to mow around the rocks and trees, but it came across as worse than that, as if she preferred it wild and ignored.
A smallish garage stood opposite the driveway from the house. I’d never seen a house that didn’t have a garage attached to it, and I thought about how inconvenient that must be for Grandma. The big green door on the front of it was down and locked with a padlock, and her car was parked on the driveway in front of it, letting me know right off the bat that the garage was not used much. At least not for her car.
A long wooden deck with a hip-high railing ran along the entire back wall of her house. It was decorated with some simple furniture, potted plants and wind chimes. And there, sitting in a worn-out, upholstered swing, was Grandma waving a glass of iced tea at us and smiling.
I had the door open and had jumped out before Dad fully stopped the car.
“Love you, Grandma!” I shouted. “I’ll say hi in a minute, but I gotta find your bathroom.”
I ran past her, into the house, and heard her call after me, “Down the hall and to the right!”
I’m sure I could have figured that out. Her house wasn’t exactly big. It had a kitchen, a living room, two bedrooms and one bathroom between them. However, her directions kept me from having to think, so I did as she said. A moment later, I felt a lot better and was able to smile and think again. I returned to my family a whole different person.
Except for the fact that I still didn’t want to be there.
Grandma had poured everyone a glass of her “sweet tea,” and they were all seated around her picnic table. She gave me a glass, and I plopped down on the squeaky swing with the faded yellow upholstery. One sip made me gag slightly. I couldn’t believe how sweet the tea actually was. It was like drinking a piece of melted sugar cane. And though it may sound strange coming from a fourteen-year-old kid, I didn’t like it. While I listened to my parents catch up with Grandma and show her pictures from their brochures of all the places they were going to visit, I twirled the ice around in my glass until it melted.
The creaking of the swing helped me tune out their voices. I’d heard all about the Louvre and Notre Dame and the Arch de Triomphe a thousand times and didn’t care to hear about them again. Somewhere in the distance I could make out a motor running. I tried to see where it was coming from, but the wooden railing of the porch was in my way. I stood up and leaned on it, gazing out at the backyard. A forest of trees wrapped around the back of the garage like a cloak. More trees stood like a troop of guards at the far end of her wild lot, attempting to block the way down to the lake.
One of those many bends in the river-ish lake went right around her property. Between the trees, I could see only the tiniest swath of deep blue water from where I was standing. It was almost as if the overgrown grass and trees were purposely arranged to block my view. No matter how far I leaned forward, I couldn’t get a better angle to see more. The motor sound grew louder. I wanted to see what kind of boat it was.
Then, as though someone read my mind and wanted to help me out, some of the tree branches blocking my view spread apart. It was just like if someone had grabbed them and pulled them aside for me. It could have been a breeze, but I didn’t feel one. Also, if it had been a breeze, the branches would have snapped back in place after a second. These held open for a solid moment, long enough for me to clearly see a speedboat whip by.
Oh, sweet! One of her neighbors had a speedboat!
I jumped over the rail and started running down to the shore to see it.
But Grandma’s shrill cry made me stop in my tracks.
“Dannie! Dannie, don’t go down there!”
2
Grandma and Her Surprises
Grandma sounded terrified. I swung around to see her running toward me, her arms out as though to stop me from falling. I glanced around, baffled by what might be scaring her so bad. Could it be some poison ivy or something? A snake in the grass? Ticks? Figuring Grandma knew something I didn’t, I came back to the house. She grabbed me up into her arms for a tight squeeze.
“I’m fine, Grandma,” I said. I could feel her heart beating through her apron. I looked at her face. It was so pale. “I’m okay. Nothing happened.”
“I know,” she said, smoothing my hair and keeping her hands on my face to stare at me for a second. “I know. You’re okay. I’m sorry. I’m a silly old lady.”
Mom came up behind Grandma, her face full of confusion and worry. That’s how she looked most of the time to me, but this seemed a little extra. “Dannie! We don’t have time for you to run off right now. Grandma’s got an early dinner planned, and then your dad and I are headed back to Nashville.” They had a flight first thing in the morning and planned to stay at a hotel near the airport instead of getting up before dawn and driving.
“I just wanted to see the boat for a second,” I said.
“You’ll see lots of boats, Dannie. I promise,” Grandma said with a tight laugh. “That’s pretty much all there is around here, boats and fish.” Admittedly, I didn’t know my grandma’s laughter real well, but it didn’t seem genuine. I tore my eyes away from the view of the lake and noticed that her smile seemed strained as she stared past me at the water, and she had her hands clenched in front of her. I craned my neck around to try to find what had caught her eye, but she put an arm around me, steering me away from the backyard and into her kitchen. “Come help me set the table.”
We had a nice dinner in her cozy kitchen. From the way Mom gushed about it throughout the meal, it appeared that the kitchen was all made over recently with new furniture and appliances. I couldn’t tell. It still looked old-fashioned to me: lace curtains, embroidered tablecloth, and worn-out dishtowels. Her food was delicious. A homemade roast with all kinds of fresh, stewed vegetables. And don’t ask me why, but when Grandma makes vegetables they’re really tasty. Buttery and salty. When Mom makes vegetables, they’re gross, bland, and still a little frozen in the middle.
Trying to be polite, I offered to do the dishes. I regretted the offer when I discovered she didn’t own a dishwasher. I wasn’t even sure how to wash dishes by hand. Slowly, I cleared the table while my parents finished their tea and nibbled at crumbs, hoping one of them would rescue me by taking over.
“I really do like what you’ve done with the house,” my mom said again.
“Well,” Grandma said, waving a hand, “it still had your dad’s so-called bachelor style all over it. I just made it mine, you know.”
My mom got quiet. Dad came over and filled the sink up with water and dishwashing liquid. He whispered, “I’ll wash, you dry.” I nodded.
“Mom, why don’t you come back to California?” my mom asked Grandma. “This isn’
t your home. It was his.”
“I was away from him too long,” Grandma said. “I should have been here.”
“You went back to him. You were both happy, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “Finally.”
“But you don’t have to stay here now.”
Nothing my mom and grandma were saying made any sense. I looked up at my dad, and he must have been able to tell how befuddled I was because he nudged me and nodded at the door. Without saying anything to the women at the table, we left the room and went back out to the porch.
“What are they talking about?” I asked.
“There are some things about your mom’s childhood that we haven’t told you.”
Heat immediately built up in me as I remembered the weird comments during the car ride about Mom not growing up here. “Like what?” I asked, not too nicely.
Dad put his forearms on the porch railing and leaned all his weight on them. He stared out at the woods. “It’s nothing bad, Dannie. We weren’t keeping anything from you. We just were waiting for you to be mature enough to hear it all.”
“I’m fifteen,” I said.
“Not yet,” he corrected. I rolled my eyes, and he smiled. He reached out a hand and pulled me to his side. “It’s not that we thought you weren’t old enough to handle it, rather we thought you just wouldn’t care enough to comprehend it. You haven’t shown a lot of interest in what we were like as kids. You’ve never asked one question about it.”
“That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have told me,” I snapped, even though I realized he was right. Thinking about it, I was pretty self-consumed most of the time. It was always about what I wanted and when I wanted it. My conversations with my parents were always about my school, my friends, my sports, my problems. When was the last time I even asked one of them how they were after a long day?
“When your mom was about three years old her parents split up. Her mom took her to California, and they stayed with your aunt Brenda in Los Angeles.”
“Grandma and Grandpa were divorced?” I couldn’t believe it. “No one ever told me that.”
Dad shook his head. “They never got divorced. They were separated for a long time, though. About twenty years or so. When your mom graduated from college and met me, your grandmother went back to Tennessee and patched things up with Hal.”
Twenty years? I’d never heard of such a thing. Who breaks up for twenty years and then gets back together?
“Why did they break up?” I asked. “It must have been something really major.”
“I don’t know what it was about. Your mom thinks your aunt Brenda talked her into it because she wanted Oleta in California with her.”
“You think she didn’t want to live in this hick town all her life? Something like that?” I asked. “That makes sense to me. I can’t imagine why anyone would live out here.”
Dad took in a long, deep breath of the fresh air that had no smog in it. He gazed at the green trees and what glimpses could be seen the deep blue lake in the distance. “Oh, I can imagine it,” he said. “If I didn’t have to work in the city, I’d move out here in a heartbeat.”
I shoved him and knocked him off balance. “You’re so full of it, Dad. You know you couldn’t live two days without a Starbucks latte and a good traffic jam to get your blood hot.” We both laughed, and he rubbed my head with his knuckles.
“Well, I guess all this explains why Mom doesn’t talk like a country singer. I always wondered.”
“And that’s a darn tootin’ shame, too,” Dad said in the fakest Southern accent I’d ever heard.
“Ain’t it just!” I quipped back, laughing hard.
Dad stood up straight. “We better finish cleaning up. Your mom and I have to leave soon.”
We went back inside and found Grandma at the sink finishing the dishes. Mom was trying to check messages on her cell phone and kept spitting out half curse words and jamming the screen with her finger like she could make it work better if she attacked it with full force. I guessed the conversation with Grandma ended badly.
“You ready?” Mom asked my dad. “The reception out here is terrible.”
“Guess so,” he replied. “You?”
“Yes.”
They gave me some tight hugs and gave Grandma some uncomfortable ones. Shouting a few last-minute rules at me from the car windows, my parents drove off for their two weeks of European bliss. The sun was setting, and shadows covered the yard. What had looked like a huge piece of land in the afternoon now looked small and forbidding. Despite the humidity, I felt a swift cold breeze, and it made me shiver. I went inside.
While Grandma finished the dishes, I moseyed around the house looking at all her dusty knickknacks on the shelves, yellowed Reader’s Digest magazines, and original art on the walls. She had a lot of oil paintings of the lake and surroundings. The scribble at the bottom right corner of each looked like it might have been Hal Garrison, but I only guessed that it was my grandpa’s name because the pictures were in his house. If I’d seen them in a gallery or something, I’d have never figured out what the signature was supposed to be.
I stepped into the bedroom that would be mine for the next ten days. It wasn’t a huge room, but it was nice enough. All the decorations were very boyish, I thought. Pictures of boats had been neatly spaced on the wood-paneled walls. The bedcovers were faded shades of red, white, and navy blue with gold anchors on them. Even the lamp had a sailing theme to it, with a brass base that had a chain and anchor by the switch. I have to admit it didn’t seem to match Grandma’s style. I saw her as more of a lace and soft pastels kind of person. Maybe Grandpa decorated the room when Grandma was living in California, and she hadn’t taken the time to change it yet. Even so, why would Grandpa decorate the room like it was meant for a boy to live in instead of making it girlish for my mom?
My suitcase was on its side under the window. I walked over to it, thinking I’d get out my bag of deodorant and toothpaste and stuff and take it down to the bathroom. As I bent over to unzip the case, something out the window caught my eye. I straightened up, pushed the slightly open curtain all the way to the side, and looked out. My bedroom had a view of the front side of the garage and all the neighboring cabins in the distance. I noticed how the woods came up right behind the garage and then peeled back away to make room for the tourist village. It was getting pretty dark out there, and the shadows between the trees were thick.
My reflection in the window was see-through, and I wondered for a moment if that’s what I would look like if I were a ghost. I stared at myself in the glass and then through my own eyes to the yard beyond. Nothing out there moved at all, so I couldn’t think what had caught my eye in the first place. My right hand let go of the curtain, and the material swung back into place.
But I swear, for a split-second, before that curtain covered the window, my reflection changed. It was higher up, like I’d grown an inch or two. The hair was longer. The shoulders wider, like a teenage boy’s. My reflection was grinning, and I didn’t think that I was. What on earth would I be smiling about?
Quickly, I swiped the curtain aside again. Silly, really. That reflection showed plain old me, looking as dorky as I usually do. I wasn’t smiling.
Pretending that my neck hadn’t stiffened up as much as it just had, I pulled the curtains closed so tight, they overlapped. Forgetting all about my suitcase, I backed away from the window and right out the bedroom door.
On my way back to the kitchen, I flipped on the lights in the small hallway that ran from the front door to the kitchen and connected the two bedrooms and bathroom to the rest of the house. A number of photographs hung on the walls. All of them featured my mom at various stages in her childhood, either by herself or with Grandma. I leaned in close to them to see my mom at all different ages. As I did so, I recognized where the pictures were taken. There was one at Disneyland and another at Universal Studios. A five-by-seven showed them in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a set of six oval pic
tures were shots from Big Bear, which I recognized because my parents took me hiking there when I was ten. Every photograph of my mom’s childhood had been a memory from California. Not one of them was taken here in Tennessee that I could tell. My dad hadn’t been exaggerating to me about my mom growing up in California instead of here. None of the pictures featured my grandpa either.
I leaned against the doorframe, looking in on my grandma as she put away the dishes. She must be so sad, I thought, to have lived away from Grandpa so long. Then she finally came back to him and they had such a short time left before he died. My parents got in fights sometimes. Well, a lot of the time. But neither of them had ever walked out on each other for even an hour, let alone twenty years. Whatever happened between Grandma and Grandpa must have been really bad.
She turned around and saw me watching her. I don’t know what kind of expression I had on my face, but she came right up to me, cupped my cheeks with her damp hands and gave me a big wet kiss on the forehead.
“Grandma!” I swiped my forehead with the back of my hand.
“Oh, you needed it,” she said, mussing what little there was of my hair. “When are you ever going to grow this back out again?”
“Never, probably.”
The disapproval in her expression was mild, and I was glad I didn’t have to defend my right to hair that required no effort. My days of barrettes and ponytail elastics were over. I never could understand why my guy skater friends grew their hair long. Not having stringy hair blowing in my face when I was doing a kickflip was freedom.
Grandma pulled out a deck of cards from a drawer. “Want to play a game?”
“Sure.”
We sat down at the kitchen table and played Crazy Eights until we were both a little loopy from it and ready to watch some primetime TV. She did have TV, thank goodness—and cable. She even let me watch a few shows on Cartoon Network and pretended like she thought they were funny. During a commercial break, a thought occurred to me.