by Sandra Kring
“Sam?” Nordine asks, as if his name was just mentioned. She’s cocking her half-rollered head from side to side, then gets up and turns around, as though maybe he’s in the living room waiting for her.
Maude shakes her head. “That poor woman,” she says. “Loved that man from the time she was a girl. She’s got one foot in the grave, and still she doesn’t realize that she was better off not having him, even if her daddy did marry her off to that piece of trash Henry. She never was overly bright, but she’s always been a sweetie.”
I watch Nordine as she shuffles back to the table. Maude goes behind her and sections another clump of damp hair to roll.
“Did my grandpa love her once? I mean, really love her, not just to … well, you know … but did he really care?”
“He did. And he beat himself up every day for not marrying her when he should have, in spite of what her daddy said. But who’s to say if things would have been any different with her. And if they hadn’t … I don’t know. This poor woman is as delicate as a rose, not strong like a weed, like you and me and your grandma.”
“I’m glad my mom and dad loved each other once, but I wish they’d gotten married. Even if he was … well, you know …” I take a sip of my drink. “He’s never tried to see my brother and me. Not once, that I know of. Maybe he’s in a mental hospital. I don’t know. But maybe I can look on the bright side and hope that, if Mom marries Peter, our real dad will let Peter adopt us, since he doesn’t want us anyway.”
Maude smiles sadly. “Drink up,” she says, as she pokes a little pink pick into another roller on Nordine’s head.
“I’m not feeling so well,” I tell her. “My stomach hurts. I think I should call my mom now.”
“You do that, kiddo. It would probably be best if you were gone by the time Henry gets back from town, anyway. You’ve had a hard enough day already.”
Milo answers the phone, and I ask him to send Mom for me. He must be on one of his ten-minute breaks from reciting pi, because he’s too rushed to ask me any questions, which is all right by me.
I hang up and take a sip of cocoa just so I’m not rude, and I watch Maude roll another piece of Nordine’s white hair. I watch the stones from her heavy rings flopping and spinning as she works. I know what those hands did long ago. They touched men’s private parts, then they folded the money they gave her afterward. They flipped off people in restaurants and petted animals with runny eyes. But at this very moment, they are rolling Nordine’s hair gently, so they won’t hurt her tender scalp. “You have pretty hands,” I tell her, and she does, even if they are spotted and old and have done some not-so-pretty things.
Maude—probably because she’s a sensate, a psychic, or just plain smart—says, “We’re all a little of both, Lucy. Good and bad. Some of us, though, like your grandpa and me, we’ve just got bigger parts of each.”
chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
MY STOMACH hurts worse as I climb into the backseat of Roger’s car.
“What in the hell are you up to, Lucy?” Mom asks as I fasten my buckle and she glares at me in the rearview mirror. “First I find you at Maude Tuttle’s, now Nordine Bickett’s. You call Peter, like there’s some sort of emergency going on that only he can handle … What in the hell’s wrong with you? And whose car is that in the driveway, anyway?”
She looks over her shoulder at the driveway as she backs out. “Crissakes, as if this day isn’t stressful enough …” She hits the brakes when she looks at me. “Are you okay?”
Mitzy looks in the backseat too. “Lucy?” she says. “What’s wrong, honey?”
My abdomen makes a fist, and something damp squeezes out to sit between my underwear and my skin. “I think I just got my first moon time,” I tell Mom.
“Moon time?” Mitzy asks.
“Her period. Your period, Lucy. It’s called your period.”
All the way home, Mom and Mitzy remind me that getting your period is a normal part of growing up.
Mom and Mitzy hustle me inside and straight to the bathroom, where Mom tugs down my jeans and looks at the splotch of blood glossing the crotch of my pink panties. Marie and Oma talk in excited whispers outside the door while Mom roots around in her bag, then pulls out a tampon. She holds it up, looks at it, then stuffs it back in her bag. “Mitzy? Can you grab a few sheets of paper towel?”
“You should have come to me,” Mom says as Mitzy slips out of the bathroom door. “Not run off like that. I was scared too when I got my first period, but, Lucy, I prepared you for this. And what exactly did you think Peter could do for you?” Mitzy hands Mom some sheets of paper towel through the door, and Mom folds them into a cylinder-shaped pad. “Here. Wear this for now. Mitzy and I will run to town and get you some real pads.”
Oma hugs me when I step out of the bathroom. “She even looks more grown up, doesn’t she?” she says to Marie. Marie eyes me carefully and nods. I think, though, that Marie senses that it’s more than the blood seeping onto sheets of paper towel decorated with teapots that has made me appear older.
“I want to go sit with Grandpa now,” I say.
“Okay,” Mom says. “We’ll go to the Rexall and get you some protection. We’ll be right back.” Mom grabs her purse and Mitzy and hurries out the door as though it’s vital they go immediately, leaving me to suspect that she’s wanting to run to town for her protection, not for mine.
As I pass Milo’s door—he’s been at it for eight hours now—he’s resetting his timer. He sees me and calls out, “I’m just starting position 48,551 plus. I’m averaging six thousand digits per hour, right up there with the current record holders.” He sets the timer down and starts again: “Three, SEVEN, two, FIVE, four—I really like that part!—EIGHT, two, FIVE …” The sounds of Grandpa Sam’s rutted breaths and rattling bed bars are filling every corner of the house, and Milo’s working hard to drown them out. I can tell by his eyes that he can hear them too and that he’s struggling hard to see the numbers in his mind rather than his grandpa fighting to breathe. I feel sorry for him, so I say, “Good job. Catch you later.”
In Grandpa Sam’s room, Aunt Jeana is sitting on the folding chair, bouncing Chico as though he’s a squalling infant. There’s a horrid odor in the room, and I think it might be the smell of death that I read about in one of those Mom-or-Dad-is-dying novels Mom picks up at the library for me to read when it’s book report time.
When Milo has an asthma attack, his eyes bulge and his whole body strains for the next breath, but that’s not how Grandpa Sam looks. His face has gone to bones, his eyelids are hanging at half-mast, and he can’t breathe, yet he looks peaceful. As if his mind, or maybe his soul, is resting comfortably, even though his body is not. I want Milo to come see, so he can stop picturing Grandpa Sam struggling to breathe like he does during an attack—only worse—but I know it’s futile to ask him to.
A forty-watt bulb on Grandpa Sam’s nightstand supplies the only light in the room, but it’s enough to cast a shadow on the wall. One that shakes with each breath, then freezes as his breath stops. When Grandpa Sam’s breathing pauses again, Aunt Jeana rotates her wrist and peers over Chico’s bobbing head to stare at her watch, stealing quick glances at Grandpa Sam’s still body. When he inhales, she sighs. “Sixteen seconds this time,” she says, before easing back against her chair again.
“My mother was buried in a brown casket,” she tells me. “She hated brown, but that’s what she got, because Sam said it was the cheapest and what did it matter, since she was dead and didn’t know what color coffin she was being buried in, anyway. I won’t bury Sam in something like that, though. Even if I have to dig into my savings. He’ll have a nice black casket with white satin lining.
“You’d think Clay would offer to pitch in for this funeral,” she adds. “He makes enough to pay for it with the change in his pocket. Everybody in this town loved Sam, and they’ll all be there. He didn’t have enough in his burial fund to go extravagant, and I have to watch my money, but he’s my
brother.”
Grandpa Sam’s leg moves, his heel scraping against the sheets, and Aunt Jeana stops. “Is he in pain?” she asks, just as Marie steps into the room.
“I don’t think so,” Marie says. “But the nurse is on standby—she’s only two miles away. If he starts looking uncomfortable, we’ll give her a call and she’ll come and give him morphine.”
Aunt Jeana’s thin lips part, and her two wisps of eyebrows crouch down over her deeply sunken eyes. “What are you all waiting for? He’s dying, for God’s sakes!” Aunt Jeana’s voice is so shrill when she raises it that I flinch, just like Chico.
“Well, she said it will compromise his breathing even more.”
“I want to be alone with my grandpa now,” I say, before Aunt Jeana can harp at Marie again.
“Excuse me?” she says.
“I said I want to be alone with my grandpa now. Please.”
Aunt Jeana lifts her chin. “What kind of a world has this turned into, when you have kids telling their elders what to do?”
“A break would do you good,” Marie tells her. “Come, let’s go see if we can round up another cup of coffee. It might be a long night.”
I want to talk to Grandpa, but aside from telling him that I know the story of my dad, I can’t find anything else to say. So I just put my hand over his instead. And again, Grandpa Sam slides his hand out from under mine and rests it on top.
Grandpa Sam starts moving his legs again. Both of them. His eyes open wider, and he turns to me. His mouth starts moving, but no words come out. Just the gurgling, raspy breaths that rattle his hospital bed.
His hand leaves mine and begins groping the sheets. I glance at the door, then stand up and lean over his bed. “Grandpa Sam? Are you in pain? Do you need your medicine now?”
His mouth moves and his eyelids open wider. He looks right at me and strains again to say something.
“I’ll get Oma,” I tell him. “She’ll call the nurse to come give you something so you don’t hurt.”
My upper body turns, and before my feet even have the chance to follow, Grandpa Sam bolts up so that he’s almost sitting erect, and his hand clamps around my wrist. I gasp, because the suddenness scares me. “No,” he says, in a voice more powerful than I’ve ever heard him use. “I’m okayyyy!” He falls back against his pillow, and after a couple more jagged breaths, he tries speaking again.
I can feel his frustration as he struggles to find the energy to get more words out. “What is it, Grandpa?”
And then, just like that, I know what he wants to say.
I lean closer. “Grandpa Sam?” I say in a rush. “You want to tell me that you love me, don’t you? And you want me to let Mom and Clay, and even Oma, know that you love them too.” He turns toward me, his eyes saying, “Yes!”
“And you want them all to know that you’re sorry too, don’t you? And that you understand why Mom and Uncle Clay can’t be in here right now.” Grandpa Sam’s whole body sighs with relief against his pillow when I say the words he can’t. His face looks peaceful again, even though his breathing has worsened.
Grandpa Sam—though his body is mummy-dry now—leaks one tear from the outer corner of his left eye, and it slips down across his bony temple. The sight of it makes my eyes tear too. “I’ll tell them, Grandpa Sam,” I say. “I promise I will.”
And then he drifts off. Not to death, but to that place that feels halfway from here, and halfway to there.
Oma slips into the room quietly. “Ten one thousand, eleven one thousand,” I count under my breath, as Oma pulls his hospital gown down to expose his chest. “Fifteen one thousand, sixteen one thousand.” There’s only one patch on his skin, about the size of a grown man’s hand, that has any pink left in it anymore. The rest is blotched with black, and his hands and arms are cold. He’s mottling, just as described in the pamphlet, page eight, seventh paragraph.
“This feels just like when you’re waiting for a child to be born,” Oma says quietly. “Rebirth feels the same. I’m glad it feels like this.”
I reach twenty one thousand before he starts another breath.
I look up at Oma, who is staring at Grandpa Sam with sadness. “He told me to tell you all something,” I say to her. She looks at me. “I heard him say it, but not with my ears. I was—”
But I stop, because Oma stops listening. She leans over Grandpa Sam’s bed, alert, because he’s stopped breathing again, this time in mid-breath.
Oma grips my arm, and I know it’s because she sees what I see. That last handprint-size patch of life leaving, gushing out in one swoosh. And although I don’t actually see a vapor, I sense that it leaves through the top of his head.
He’s dying! And in a rush of panic—because I’d forgotten to say it back—I shout, “I love you too, Grandpa Sam!”
In a whoosh, he takes another half breath, and he comes right back into his body. He turns his head and his eyes are scanning until they find their place, locked right with mine.
And then, in a split second, he’s gone again.
This time, for good.
“Did you see that, Lucy? Did you see that?” Oma says, elated, even though she’s crying. “He came right back into his body when you said those words. He came back, as if to gather that love right up to take with him to the other side.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Marie says. We turn and look at her, and she adds, “I heard his breathing and knew he was going, so I came back.”
Oma leaves the bed and hurries to the window, cracking it open. “So his spirit can leave,” she says. She folds her hands below her belly, her head down. Standing respectfully still, like a spectator on the street during a veterans’ parade.
Only after she believes his spirit is gone does Oma come back to the bed and close the eyelids on the body Grandpa Sam just left. “I’ll go tell them he’s gone,” Marie says.
They all come in Grandpa Sam’s room once it’s over. Mom, Uncle Clay, Aunt Jeana, Mitzy, and Marie. Only they don’t come all the way in. They crowd at the door, except for Aunt Jeana, who comes to the bed and pats Grandpa Sam’s hand as though she’s saying, “There, there, it’s all right.” She’s crying but without making a sound.
We stand for a few moments in silence, staring at the still mound on the sheets, and then Marie comes to stand at the foot of the bed. She starts singing a song that sounds like a prayer, in the language of her people. Her prayer song reaches down deep in me and strokes the sad part sitting there, and I can’t do a thing but put my head on Grandpa Sam’s still-warm but empty chest and sob.
chapter
TWENTY-NINE
PETER COMES just minutes after Grandpa Sam dies, and, as I knew he would, he knows what to do. He shakes hands with Uncle Clay, then holds Mom and opens his arms so I can fit into their hug too. “You okay?” he whispers to me as we hug, and I nod my head. Peter’s presence itself works like an antianxiety pill on Mom. At least for a time.
Aunt Jeana is sitting at the table, the phone book open. “I need to call Hartwig’s,” she says, her finger making little zigzags down the short list of funeral homes. She pulls her hand away and brings it to the side of her tear-dampened face. “Oh, I can hardly think,” she says.
“Would you like me to call them?” Peter asks, and Aunt Jeana nods. He takes the phone book and finds the number quickly. The funeral home tells Peter that it will be a while, because they’re out on another call. Aunt Jeana looks alarmed. “So we just let him lay? Oh, my Lord,” she says. “It feels wrong. Just wrong.”
Maybe Oma feels the same, because without saying a word she goes to the sink and fills a small basin of water, then she gets her soft essential-oils bag, the one with a moon and stars on it, and slips into the bathroom. She comes out with a couple of towels.
“What’s she doing?” Mom asks no one in particular.
“Washing his body,” Oma says as she shimmies as carefully as she can around the kitchen table, a few drops of water sloshing over Aunt Jea
na’s head.
Clay snorts, then he leans over to Mom and says quietly, “Jesus … who does she think he is—Jesus?” Aunt Jeana doesn’t seem to hear him, but she hears Mom’s nervous snicker, and she scowls. I give Mom and Clay a dirty look, because all I want right now is for us to get along like a nice family.
EVERYONE IS still huddled in the kitchen, Aunt Jeana on the phone, when Oma comes out with the basin of dirty water, the damp towels draped over her arm. Mom scuttles away from the sink, as if skin cells from a dead dad are even more repulsive than those from a dreadlocked waitress.
Aunt Jeana hangs up the phone and moves around the kitchen like a nervous bird, her hand pecking in the drawers. “Does Sam have a decent suit to wear?” she asks.
“I found one last week. I’ll air it out on the line and wash the shirt,” Oma says, then adds, “What are you looking for, Jeana?”
“Paper and a pencil. I’ve got to write Sam’s obituary for the paper and find a church that will bury him. I just found out that the pastor of the Methodist church is in the hospital with pneumonia, and their lay pastor was called away for a death in his own family. I don’t know what we’re going to do now. I know that church would have buried him, because I’m a member. Any of you a member of a church?” she asks. When no one answers, she says, “Well, I’m not surprised. Now we’ve got a problem on our hands. Sam didn’t go to church. No church is going to bury someone who has no connection to them.”
“How very Christian of them,” Mom says.
“We shouldn’t have dismissed hospice,” Oma says. “They would have helped us with these plans. With all of it.”
“Nonsense,” Aunt Jeana says. “We don’t need outsiders in our business.”
Aunt Jeana barks at me to get out the phone book. “The big one. The one that includes the surrounding towns,” she says. “If need be, we’ll take him over to Larksville or Trent.”
“Or we can just have it at the funeral home,” Mom says. “Why does it have to be held in a church, anyway?”