Thank You for All Things (15 page)

I don’t know if anyone’s home inside that stare, but I feel like talking, and I decide that even if Grandpa Sam doesn’t register what I’m saying, what difference does it
make? Milo doesn’t seem to register much of what I say either.

“You know what, Grandpa Sam? Upstairs there is a stack of notebooks Mom wrote in when she was a girl. My mom’s your daughter, Tess, in case you’ve forgotten.”

He turns his head to look at me when I sit on the edge of his bed, but I don’t know if it’s just his brain stem telling him to turn toward the source of noise or a conscious decision to look at me. I decide it doesn’t matter.

“She writes about you being her dad and Oma being her mom. About the things that happened, and what she was thinking about at the time. She wrote about you making toboggans.”

“I make toboggans,” Grandpa Sam says.

“Did you make one for Mom and Uncle Clay?” I ask.

His watery eyes look away, but I don’t know if that means he’s thinking or not, because he doesn’t rotate his eyeballs upward, like he’s trying to search his mind for the memory. “Yeah,” he says.

“Mom wrote about you making them one for Christmas, but you ended up giving it to Ralphy Bickett. They got a store-bought sled instead. They wanted the one you made for them, though,” I say.

Grandpa Sam doesn’t comment.

I want to ask him why he kicked the ornament box, but I don’t want him to feel bad. “I never went sledding before, did you?” I ask.

“I was sick,” he says.

“You mean you were going to go sledding once, but you got sick and couldn’t go?”

“No. Then I had to go to work.”

“Maybe this winter you and I can go sledding, huh?
There’s a sled in the basement. Would you like that? I’d help you get on it.”

Grandpa Sam lifts his head and strains. His stiff hands grab a handful of bedsheet and he tugs.

“You want to get up, Grandpa?”

“Yeah,” he says.

I’ve seen Oma get him up, so I pull back his quilt and I take him by the ankles and swing his feet as far off the bed as they’ll go. Then I grab his arms and yank until I get him in a sitting position. We both need a rest after that, so I use the opportunity to ask him the question I want answered the most.

“Grandpa? Did you know my dad? Howard Smith?”

Grandpa Sam actually looks like he’s thinking for a minute, then he says, “Junice lives in the Howards’ house now.” He looks down at his bare feet, which have thick, flaky toenails—toenails that were so long yesterday that, as Oma was clipping them and Mom happened to walk through the living room and glance down, she said, “Crissakes, give him a tree branch and he could perch.”

Grandpa Sam studies the floor. “What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Where’s my slippers?”

I get on my knees and look under the bed, and I see them. They’re brown suede, the toes scuffed. I pull them out and slip them over Grandpa Sam’s feet, which are bony and feel cool like doll skin.

Wrinkled and dull-eyed as Grandpa Sam is, and with his hair sparse and white and standing on end, he suddenly looks as cute as a homely baby, and I reach out and give him a hug.

“I like you, Grandpa Sam. Do you like me too?” I ask
this as if the person I’m talking to isn’t the same person Mom wrote about when she was a girl.

“Yeah,” he says, but he doesn’t smile like I do, so I’m not sure if he means it.

I reach out and pat his hair down, but it springs right back up. “Grandpa Sam, can you tell me anything about my dad, Howard Smith? Did you know him? Did he live here in Timber Falls?”

“You didn’t have a dad,” Grandpa Sam says.

Scientifically, of course, Grandpa Sam has to be wrong. But as he said himself, his brain is broken. I sigh, realizing I’m not about to get any answers about my father from him either.

“Lucy? Is Grandpa awake?” Oma shouts.

“Yes,” I yell back.

“Okay. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.”

Grandpa Sam is trying to rise from the bed. Or so it seems, since he’s bending forward. I try to show him how to rock to gain momentum, but he doesn’t mimic me, so I wrap my arms around his chest and clutch my hands together at his back, and with his help I manage to get him standing. I put the walker in front of him and take his hands, wrapping them over the metal bar, and I walk him out.

“You got him up?” Oma says when she sees us, a mop in her hand. “Oh, Lucy, he’s too heavy for you!”

“We did it together, didn’t we, Grandpa Sam?”

Oma helps Grandpa get into his lift chair, then hurries off to scoot the refrigerator back in place.

I watch Grandpa Sam as he gazes out the window, where a red squirrel is hanging upside down on the feeder’s pole, gobbling bird seed. Grandpa tries to lean over far enough to reach the window with his knuckles. “Goddamn
red squirrels,” he says slowly as he gazes out the window.

“Mean sons of bitches. They bite the balls off the gray ones.”

I purse my lips to keep my giggle inside.

He turns back to me, and I realize that since we got here, I’ve not seen one expression on Grandpa Sam but this one. The sad one. As if his face were molded out of wax by a starving artist too poor to buy Paxil, and he is helpless to change it. I tap the pointed collar of his flannel shirt in place. “Grandpa Sam, did you like my mom? You know, when she was a girl like me?”

His eyelids slowly scrape down over his watery eyes. He opens his mouth like he’s going to answer my question, but he doesn’t say anything except to swear again at the squirrel at his feeder. I rap on the window and the squirrel scurries off. Two fat-bellied blue jays come to take his place. “Look, blue jays,” I tell Grandpa. He opens his eyes and stares out the window. “Pigs,” he says. “They chase away the good birds.”

Once he dozes off, I go into the kitchen, where Oma now has the top of the range propped open like a car hood. She’s clanking on the burners to free them of black crud. “Oma, what was Grandpa Sam like when he was young?”

“Well, it depends on when you’re talking about.”

“Like, when he was a kid.”

“I didn’t know Sam then, and he didn’t talk about his childhood much. His mom died when he was ten. I know that much. And people say she was a sweet little thing. I knew his dad because he was still alive when we married. He was very hard on Sam.”

“Was he glad Grandpa Sam married you?”

“That man wasn’t glad about anything. Not that it would have mattered one way or another to me. I was head over heels in love with your grandpa. How could I not be? He
was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. And so smart he was like a walking encyclopedia. He was obsessed with learning, as if knowledge was his water and he was always thirsty. You and your brother take after him like that.”

Oma and I don’t hear the hum of Grandpa’s lift chair, nor do we hear the click of the front door. What we hear instead is the horn of Oma’s car bleating frantically. “Oh, Mom must want help carrying stuff in,” I say. Oma apparently feels the gust of cool air entering the kitchen at the same time I do, because she rocks back on one foot and peers into the living room, the grungy dishcloth dangling from her hand. “Is that the front—” Before she can get the rest of the words out, we hear a deafening crack and the echo it makes as it reverberates against the trees, followed by Mom’s shrill scream.

“Oh, my God, was that a shotgun?”

Oma and I race to the front door, which is hanging open.

Grandpa Sam is at the bottom of the steps, one foot bare, a rifle lifted only high enough to tuck it against his side. The rifle is haphazardly lined up with Oma’s parked car, its door open. I scream then too, because even though I can hear Mom, I’m suddenly afraid that she’s lying on the front seat in a bloody mess.

But then I see her crouched alongside the car, a book bag dangling from one hand and a shopping bag clutched in her other. She lets go of the bags and makes a beeline for the maple tree between the house and the car. The tree is too narrow to hide all of her, though, and maybe that’s why she screams and screams.

“Give me that gun, Sam! Sam!” Oma grabs the rifle and yanks it from his hand. She’s shaking hard. “It’s okay, Tess. It’s okay! I’ve got the gun!”

Mom slips out and stands alongside the tree, hugging it as if she might fall down if she lets go. “I saw him with the gun and beeped for you. Why didn’t you come?”

“What on earth did you think you were doing?” Oma shouts at Grandpa. Mom stumbles to Oma, and Oma wraps her arm around her, a hand nervously thumping Mom’s back. “My God,” Oma says again.

“He waited for me like a sniper!”

Grandpa Sam blinks at us with dull eyes, then looks to the tree Mom just vacated. “Goddamn red squirrels,” he says.

I
T TAKES
Oma a solid week to get the house “in order.” She pares down the clutter and boxes up mounds of knick-knacks, pans with peeling nonstick finishes, and the afghans she says Grandpa’s third wife must have made compulsively. Then she scrubs the whole place with baking soda, vinegar, and salt, until the entire house smells like a pickle. When she’s finished scrubbing, she feng shui arranges the house, moving the kitchen table from the center of the floor over toward the living-room doorway, so close to the cupboards that I can’t see how a full-grown adult or even a kid—or chi, for that matter—is going to be able to squeeze around it to roam freely through the house.

Mom knocks over a green vase with artificial flowers in colors that don’t quite match as she sits at the table working on Missy Jenkins’s tale and surfing the Net with the DSL hookup she finally got (but only after she called to harp at Connie Olinger at least twice). She cusses as she scoops it up. “If you were cleaning out junk, why in the hell did you leave these ugly fake flowers everywhere? Whoever came up with the idea of making flowers out of feathers should have been shot. And what’s up with all the mirrors?”

“She’s using the flowers to create chi, as a remedy against shars—negative energy,” I say. “And mirrors reflect shars.”

“I wish I had my crystals here,” Oma says to herself.

Mom tilts her head to the side and glances into a small mirror tacked up under the cupboard. “This one looks like a fun-house mirror,” she says, “which is somehow wryly appropriate.”

Oma leans over Mom to check the mirror and gasps, since mirrors that are distorted have a negative effect on chi—then she asks Mom to move her chair so she can take it down. “Damn it, Ma, I need to find a way to get some work done here, since here seems to be where I’m stuck for now. You understand?” Mom gestures toward the living room, where the TV channels are going spastic again, and Oma squeezes between the counter and table to get into the living room to grab the remote.

“What in the hell is the table doing over here, anyway? Never mind,” Mom says. She sighs. “Between being back here and not having a damn thing to my name right now … God, I’m ready to slit my wrists, even if I have to use a dull butter knife to do it.”

“Tess, the way you talk!” Oma shouts from the living room.

I think even Mom believes she might bring some bad karma on herself for saying such a thing, because she apologizes quickly for her mood, blames it on the circumstances, suggests maybe she needs her antidepressant dosage upped, then tells me to get back to my reading. I put my head down before I roll my eyes.

In spite of what Mom says—that it’s the stress of being homeless and back in this “dump” that is making her so edgy—I know it’s about more than those things. “You’re only crabby because you haven’t talked to Peter in weeks,” I tell her.

“Fourteen days, six hours, thirty-two minutes, and twenty-six seconds,” Milo says, as he comes into the room and glides to the fridge to pour himself a glass of orange juice.

“Stay out of my business, you two.”

I did a paper on the effects of love once, so I know that Mom’s in chemical withdrawal. She’s restless and not sleeping well, judging from the bags under her eyes. Eyes, I might add, that obviously cry in the night, because they’re red and puffy when she wakes. And the other night, when she plugged the charger into her cell phone and the little red light wouldn’t go on, she got so upset that she yanked it out of the wall and whipped it against the counter. If the charger wasn’t broken before the crash, it certainly was afterward.

Oh, how I loved it when Mom was in the throes of new love! When her brain was shooting dopamine, estrogen, oxytocin, and testosterone into her body like an oil field, tempering her worrying and critical thinking system. During those first couple of months, even when I brought the mail in, she didn’t flinch and go into distress mode. I knew, though, even back then, that we’d be in trouble when her
brain calmed down and she and Peter had to rely on the bonding chemical, oxytocin, to keep them together. Oxytocin. It’s also the “trust” chemical. The one Mom seems incapable of producing when it comes to men, just as some bodies are incapable of producing insulin.

Sure enough, a few months into the relationship, Mom started getting fearful that it wouldn’t last—like she thinks all good things can’t—and I saw her getting jealous and suspicious every time Peter was late. About that time, I noticed that Peter was spending the night less often too, because I stopped finding him on the couch in the morning, the pillow not even dented from his head, the blanket still folded neatly on the opposite end, and him stretching and giving a fake yawn so that Milo and I would believe (and Milo probably did) that he’d slept on the couch all night, rather than in Mom’s bed.

I wrote a second paper then, explaining how after those first five months or so, those outrageous hormones settle down, but a twenty-minute hug or cuddling session is all it takes for a good dose of the trust hormone to be released by the brain all over again.

I pointed out, too, how males need to be touched four times more than females, thinking maybe she’d make those small gestures—a hand on Peter’s shoulder, a tap to his belly, or a brush across his back as she passed him to go into the bathroom or kitchen—like she used to do when her brain was going nuts. I was sure she’d get the hint and be grateful for the information and use it. So sure was I that on the night I gave her that second paper, I tagged after Milo when he went into our room to grab a library book and I asked him what he was reading. He turned it around so I could see the cover, some nonsense about quantum
superposition and multiple universes. The poor kid got so excited I thought he’d have an asthma attack when I asked him a question just so he’d stay out of the front room and give Mom and Peter enough time for an effective hug. “So,” I asked. “If there’s more than one universe, how do you know we’re both in the same one?”