Thank You for All Things

by Sandra Kring

  “How long have you been with him?” Mom asks.

  “Lemme see. Going on three years now.”

  “Any wedding plans?”

  Mitzy picks up her fork and knife and begins cutting her tuna-stuffed sandwich in half. “Nah. He’d like to. He’s in his forties. He’s ready for kids.”

  “And?” Mom asks.

  “I can’t go through that again, Tess. Just can’t. But I can’t ask him to give up his dream of having children either, so I don’t know.”

  I look at Mom, who’s looking at Mitzy with one of those let’s-talk-more-about-this-later looks.

  “What about you?” Mitzy asks suddenly. “Anyone special in your life?”

  “There was,” I say, and Mom tells me to shut up and eat, forgetting already how lucky she is that I didn’t die at birth. Mitzy takes her cue and shuts up about it too.

  They catch up on gossip about their graduating class, and then, while I’m munching my last potato chip, Mitzy says, “Oooh! Oooh! That reminds me! I read your book, The Absent Savior!”

  “Well, I knew about the retired schoolteacher from Vermont who read it and wrote me … I was wondering who the other person was,” Mom says, laughing at her own joke, even though I know she doesn’t think it’s funny. “How’d you find out about it?”

  “From Pamela Kort. I ran into her one day, right here in Coffee Beans. I hadn’t seen her since graduation. She got her thighs lipoed, and she looked great. Anyway, she’s out on the East Coast now, teaching at the same university that published your book. She told me all about it, and I ordered it online as soon as I got home. Oh, Tess. All I could think of when I read it was how Louis was right. I meant to write you through your publisher and tell you that, but … well. I’m sorry.

  “Anyway, it was a beautiful book. And it wasn’t hard to see that the ‘absent savior’ in the book was really Rachel’s father, not Asher. It was her relationship—or lack of it—that—”

  Mom interrupts Mitzy by glancing at her watch with such exaggeration that a 1940s starlet would have felt threatened. “Shit! Sorry to interrupt you, Mitz, but, wow, where did the time go? I’ve got to get this stuff back to Ma. I can’t believe she hasn’t called me yet.” I scoop my pickle and grapes up as Mom scoots me out of the booth with her butt.

  “Oh, okay.” Mitzy looks a little dazed. “How long are you staying in town?”

  Mom sighs. “A day or two at the most. Ma asked me to stay a few, but no way can I do that.”

  “Let’s get together, though. Please? How about my place. Breakfast, tomorrow morning?”

  Mom nods and Mitzy quickly jots her address on a sticky note, and then they play tug-of-war with the check.

  They hug on the street, then Mitzy hugs me. “I’m afraid your mother and I hogged up all the time, and I didn’t even get to find out one thing about you.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell her. “There isn’t all that much to tell, since I’m still only a child.”

  Mitzy laughs and hugs me again. “Precocious, just like her mother, I see.”

  As Mom and I walk to the car, an older woman pauses to give us a second glance, and Mom grabs my sleeve. I have to trot to keep up with her.

  By the time we get to Oma’s car, Mom is her old self again: quiet, emotionless, lost in her own thoughts. I know about personas, of course, those masks we wear to make impressions on others. And seeing Mom as she is now, and remembering how animated and soft she was with Mitzy, I wonder which—if either—is Mom’s true self. “We’ll grab the groceries and get back,” she says. She’s distracted as we shop, and she doesn’t say a word as we drive home. That is, not until we’re pulling up the drive. Then she stares up at the dirty-snow-colored house and mutters, “Someone shoot me. Just frikkin’ shoot me.”

  chapter

  SEVEN

  IT’S EVENING, and Mom and Milo are at the kitchen table, engrossed in their work, while I help Oma dry the dishes. Mom and Oma aren’t speaking, because a bit ago they had an argument about Mom suddenly wanting to head back to Chicago that very instant. Oma guilted her for even thinking of having two children on the road in the middle of the night, and now the only sounds in the kitchen are the tinkling of plates as we put them away and an occasional huffy sigh from Mom.

  Oma sets her cup of lemongrass tea on the counter and asks Milo—who has his nose almost scraping his book on the table, his inhaler in hand—if he’ll help her get Grandpa Sam to the bathroom so she can give him a bath. Right now he is in the living room, flicking channels again, the volume suddenly blasting. “Oh, dear,” Oma mutters. “There he goes again! He’s been doing that with the clicker all day. Come, Milo.”

  Oma goes into the living room and asks Grandpa Sam nicely for the remote. The channels keep flipping, and then Oma doesn’t sound so patient. “Oh, my God! Sam, give me that. Give me the remote!”

  I hear the stations flick quickly, so I think it’s Grandpa still doing the flicking, but then Oma shouts out, “Oh, my God. What channel was that? They said after the commercial … here! Tess, come here. Quick!”

  I race into the living room, where Grandpa Sam sits in his lift chair, his arm outstretched, his hand still clutching the remote, even though Oma is manning it. Mom is right behind me. “Jesus, that thing loud enough?” she says, half drowning the voice of the reporter, who’s saying, “And in Chicago, fire rips through a recently condemned apartment complex on the lower south side.”

  Oma waves her hand at the TV as the pretty black reporter says, “Sylvia Decker is on the scene with this live report …”

  “I saw it while he was flicking!” Oma says, then she shushes us, even though she’s the only one talking.

  The camera shifts to a burning building, and my throat tightens when I realize it’s our building, red lights splashing against the brick, flames shooting like protruding tongues mocking the screams of sirens and people. Mom gasps.

  I recognize a face from the stoop, and I search the crowd huddled on the street, looking for the rest of the tenants I know. I don’t know many of their names, but I know their faces. I look for the little girl who handed me the leaf, and her dark-skinned mother with the rust-colored hair. I search between shoulders for the faded, little old Japanese man I call “Mr. U” because he is so bent over that he looks like the letter U tipped on its side. I look for the strange man two doors down who leaves his door open when the summer heat is oppressive—even if he is in his underwear—and you can hear his parrot talking in human words with more clarity than the old man uses when answering him. I don’t know any of them well, really, yet I’m suddenly worrying about them all as if they are family when I don’t find them in the quick camera shots. “Many of them probably moved out already, Lucy,” Oma says to comfort me.

  The camera slides up the side of the building, revealing fire shooting out of every window on the second floor and smoke billowing out of the rest. I feel like crying. Our building was butt-ugly, as Mom often said, but it was home. And everything but what we have here with us is melting and burning up, including our computers.

  The cameras move to the front stoop, where masked firemen are carrying out bodies on stretchers, two with white sheets sheathing their faces. Some people are being helped out of a window into a metal cage, their faces darkened with soot and smoke and fear as they are lowered to the ground, where paramedics wait to clamp oxygen masks over their faces. Seeing them, I forget about our things and the building itself and worry about the people again.

  “That son of a bitchin’ slumlord!” Mom says. “He couldn’t wait until the building was evacuated before he torched it, now, could he?”

  “Oh, dear, I had a sinking feeling just last night that something bad was going to happen. That’s what made me stop you from leaving,” Oma says, as though her lemongrass tea had already done its job.

  Sylvia Decker yammers on, shouting, saying nothing, because there’s nothing she knows beyond what she can see, which is exactly the same as what we can see.

 
; “Oh, God,” Mom groans. “All of our things. Our books. Our clothes. Furniture. Everything.”

  “Did you have renter’s insurance?” Oma asks.

  “How in the hell could I have renter’s insurance? I could hardly make my rent.”

  “Our computers. My notes …” Milo says, and he looks ready to cry. Oma sits down beside him and pats his back as though she’s burping him. “They’re only things, Milo. Things can be replaced.”

  “Not if you don’t have a dime to replace them with,” Mom says.

  Their exchange leads me to do a running tally of what things of mine are now being consumed by the flames shooting out of the very window where I stood watching Peter leave, and I decide that I’ve lost practically nothing of value in that building, except my computer, and maybe my pictures of Scott Hamilton, a pair of summer shorts I especially like (that probably wouldn’t have fit me by next summer anyway), a couple of scrapbooks, and my Sigmund Freud puppet. And then I think of how grateful I am that my important things—the words I read, my memories—are safely stored up in my head.

  “Shit,” Mom says.

  We’re still watching the screen when Grandpa Sam grabs the remote from the arm of the couch and starts ramming buttons again. By the time Oma swipes it back, the news has moved on to a segment about some Hollywood couple that’s split up.

  Mom doesn’t say anything. She just goes out the front door.

  Oma, Milo, and I sit for a moment, no one making a peep but for Feynman, who is suddenly at Milo’s knee, his butt wagging, small whines vibrating the flappy skin hanging from his neck.

  “Go on and take him out to do his business,” Oma says.

  Milo looks up at her. “Does this mean we have to stay here now?”

  “For a while, yes. I’d imagine so.”

  Milo looks forlorn as he pats his scrawny thigh, cueing Feynman to follow him. Oma grabs her cigarette case and follows them out, and I follow her.

  “Oma?” I say, as we stroll slowly through the backyard, Oma smoking and watching Feynman running in circles around Milo. “I was sad and scared for the people and our things when I saw the report, but I felt glad too. Glad because Mom and Milo and I weren’t in it. And because it means I’ll probably get to stay here longer. Did I just create some bad karma?”

  Oma wants to hug me, I can tell, but she won’t touch me while she’s exhaling hundreds of toxins.

  “Oh, honey. No,” Oma says. “It’s only human to think like that. Why would God punish someone for being the very thing She created them to be?”

  Oma flicks the ash from her cigarette stub on the grass, then grinds it out with the heel of her slipper. With the butt still in her hand, she puts her arm around my shoulder and we stand quietly together for a time.

  “Oma,” I say. “It’s synchronicity at work again, isn’t it?

  You want us to stay longer, and I want to too. Mom wanted to leave so we could get back and pack and now there’s nothing to pack, and we have nowhere to live but here.”

  Oma is looking toward the front yard, where Mom is pacing, her cell phone to her ear. Mom pulls it away and bangs on the keys, then puts it back to her ear. “My little Lucy. As bright as the stars,” Oma says softly, sadly, and I smile even though I’m sad, because I love the sound of her voice when she says those words.

  chapter

  EIGHT

  THE NIGHT of the fire, I sleep with Oma again, even though I could have avoided her snores by sleeping in one of the spare rooms upstairs. I didn’t want to be alone. The next morning I wake in an empty bed, take a shower, and find Milo and Oma in the kitchen, Grandpa Sam sitting at the table with them. “There’s oatmeal on the stove, and your muffin and juice are here on the table.”

  Oma catches a clump of oatmeal that is slipping down Grandpa’s chin, and she scoops it back in. She plucks a raisin off of his dish-towel bib and pops that back into his mouth too. “Your mom went off to have breakfast with her friend Mitzy. She told me to see that you two get straight to your studies after breakfast.”

  “Why are you telling me?” Milo asks. He’s not offended, just sincerely confused.

  “So she doesn’t have to single me out, stupid,” I say. “I think we all know that you don’t need any prompting to study. To breathe, maybe, but not to study.”

  “Lucy,” Oma says with a sigh. “I really wish you wouldn’t speak to your brother like that.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I say.

  While we eat, I keep my eyes on my oatmeal, on Milo, or on Feynman (who happens to be contentedly licking his testicles while lying at Milo’s feet), rather than on the oatmeal spurting out of Grandpa’s mouth. Now that he’s awake, I want to watch him, to study him, but not while he’s slobbering his food.

  “We have a paper to write too, Lucy,” Milo says. “Don’t forget about that.”

  “I was going to write mine on the relationship between Freud and Jung, but how am I supposed to do that now, with no Internet or books to use for my research?”

  “You always write about them, so why would you need to do more research? It’s not fair either,” Milo huffs, “that Mom lets you pick them for your subjects all the time.”

  “Your mom is going to stop at the library this morning,” Oma explains, “and she’s also going back to the cable office to order the Net. Did you check Grandpa’s library? Maybe he’s got some books in there you could use, if you choose another subject.”

  “There are no biographies in there, and Lucy always does hers on people,” Milo says.

  “Are you sure there aren’t?” Oma asks.

  “There’s not if he says there aren’t,” I tell Oma. “He’d know because he’s reorganizing all of Grandpa’s books according to the Dewey decimal system.” Oma blinks at Milo like she’s not sure what to make of him, but of course she doesn’t say anything.

  “Does it have to be someone famous?” Oma asks.

  “I don’t know. Mom’s never said. But I’d imagine so. If they’re not famous, what could there possibly be to write about?”

  Oma laughs. “Oh, dear child, everyone has a story. Take your grandpa here, for instance. He lived in a boxcar. How many people—famous or otherwise—can lay claim to that?”

  “A boxcar?”

  “Yes, you know. One of those cars on a railroad train that are always filled with that pretty graffiti.”

  “I know what a boxcar is, Oma. I’m just asking why.”

  She pats Grandpa Sam’s face with the corner of a towel. “Well, your grandfather was born in 1930, just months after the stock market crashed. His dad was already struggling to make ends meet, and when the country slid into the Great Depression, they lost everything they owned. Sam’s father had worked for the Soo Line before the Depression and they lived next to the tracks, so I guess it was a feasible option when they lost their house and their land.”

  Oma glances at Grandpa and smiles sadly. “Once, he’d have thrown a fit for my mentioning that, because it shamed him. He was always such a proud man.”

  Oma tries to give Grandpa Sam another spoonful, but he slowly lifts his hand and swats the spoon away. “That’s shit,” he says.

  “Your mother got her potty mouth from him,” Oma says as she gives Grandpa’s face a final swipe, then carries the bowl to the sink. While she’s swirling his bowl under a stream of water, she says, “Sam was ten years old when his dad kicked him out. They didn’t have money to feed all those mouths, and the older ones had to leave to find work. He worked on a farm for a time, then rode the rails, going from town to town, city to city, taking whatever odd jobs he could find. A year after Sam left, we entered World War Two and the economy turned around. That’s when your great-grandpa decided there was money to be made, and he summoned Sam home so he could help him make it.”

  “Flora brought me biscuits,” Grandpa Sam says, and Oma asks him who Flora was. He doesn’t answer, though.

  While Oma is filling the sink with dishwater, Grandpa stands on shaky legs and reaches for his
walker. “Where are you going, Sam?” She shuts off the faucet and cranks her head around and watches him shuffle into the living room. “He must be going to watch TV.”

  Oma is drying dishes and humming something that sounds like a Gregorian chant and I’m at the table pretending to do my geometry when Milo comes out of the study and says, “Is Grandpa supposed to be outside? I just saw him outside my window, looking in.”

  Oma drops her dishcloth and hurries out the door. I dart after her.

  “Sam! Sam!” Oma yells, as he shuffles his feet across the grass—one slipper missing, a dented lunch box in his hand. “Lucy, catch him before he reaches the road. Hurry!”

  I reach him in time and take his arm. He’s breathing hard. He looks down at me, seeing me as if for the first time.

  Now that I have him, I’m not quite sure what to do with him, so I just hang on to his wrist and wait for Oma to reach us. I use those few seconds to stare into his face. His eyes show confusion, but the rest of his features look drawn and sad. I think of him working hard since he was a boy, and how now he’s wearing diapers, wandering around with an empty lunch box, and I know why his face is frozen in sadness.

  “I can’t find my truck keys,” he says. “Where are my keys?”

  “Come on, Grandpa,” I say.

  He lets me turn him and steer him toward Oma, who is shaking something out of her slipper. He asks her where his truck keys are too. She takes his lunch box. “Come on, Sam. Let’s go back inside.”

  He slips his hand out of hers. “I want my goddamn keys. Where’d you put them?”

  “Come on, we’ll go inside and find them.”

  I know Oma means well, but according to what I read, to go along with a stroke victim’s fantasies only serves to confuse them more.

  “Grandpa Sam?” He stops and wags his head to the side so he can look down at me again. “You can’t have your keys. You’ve had strokes, and your mind and body don’t work well enough to drive. Or to go to work anymore. But maybe if you want to go someplace besides work, Mom can drive you.”