The Postcard

To my grandmother Mary Banyar 1900–1978

CHAPTER ONE

“She died today.”

It was the first Wednesday night after school let out for the summer. I had just switched on the television and was searching with the remote —reality, reality, news, rerun, reality — when the phone rang, and my mother answered it.

“Wait, say that again?” I said.

She pulled the phone away from her face and cupped her hand over it. “She died this afternoon. Your father wants you to come down for a few days. You can get a standby flight in the morning.”

I hit the mute button on the remote. “Grandma?”

“He wants you there. There’s a lot to do.”

I kept watching the screen, but my eyes began to unfocus.

My grandmother. A hospital had called two weeks ago to say she had been brought in with a stroke and was in a coma, so Dad took the next plane down from Boston and had been there ever since. I’d never met Grandma. We never saw her as a family, and she didn’t travel. Even my father said that when he was young she wasn’t around very much, and he was sometimes brought up by other people, which made her seem odd to me.

I had no clue then about how she lived or who she was or what was going to happen to me because of her.

“I just got out of school,” I said, glancing up at my mother. “It hasn’t even been a week. I really don’t want to —”

“He’ll call you back,” she said into the phone. “Yes . . . I know . . . Ray, I know!”
Click.
“You’re going.”

We hadn’t really talked about Grandma much since she had gone “off,” as my mother called it. Dementia-of-the-Alzheimer’s-Type, she told a friend on the phone once. I was three or four when that started. Mom said it was sad when this happened to old people. “It really is,” she said. But she also said that my grandmother insisted she could fly — that she was “vehement” about it. I could tell the idea of a flying old lady really freaked my mother out. Other times, Dad let it slip that Grandma had called claiming she was in danger and had to escape, or was being attacked by alligators.

“Again?” Mom said. “They really should keep reptiles away from older people.”

There was something going on between my parents about Grandma, but I never knew exactly what it was. I think all the talk and the silences embarrassed my dad, especially in front of me, so after a while he didn’t talk about her, and neither did we.

One thing I do remember. My dad once received a letter from St. Petersburg where she lived. In it was a photograph of her sitting in a wheelchair in front of a little green house. She looked like a tiny bird skeleton, fragile, bony. She was as thin as nothing.

I remember thinking she would probably die soon. In a few weeks at most. Weeks stretched into months and finally into years. She was eighty-two on her last birthday. Her name was Agnes Monroe Huff.

“What does Dad actually want me there for?” I asked, flipping the sound back on and turning it low. “I don’t know how to do anything. Why not you? I can stay with Becca or Mark.”

She was already marching upstairs. “I have to fly this weekend for the bank,” she called. “You’re going down there. I’ll get your duffel bag from the attic. Shut that off, Jason. Now.”

CHAPTER TWO

So my name is Jason, and I think my family is splitting up.

When the jet lifted off the runway the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about me being in the air and my parents on the ground in two different places, and it seemed so obvious that I was amazed it had taken me so long to see it. Hector knew it for I don’t know how long. The way he finally said it a couple of years ago was as if he thought I knew it, too.

We were at lunch on Tuesday the first week of sixth grade, comparing notes about who in our homeroom had had the best summer experience (“Paris with my two uncles,” “the doctor said I nearly died,” “rafting, and I even saw a bear!” compared to my “lawn mowing” and Hector’s “hammocking, because,” as he said, “I’m the
hammock king
!”), when I opened my lunch bag, looked in, and pretended to gag.

“Jeez, what is that? Sliced dog brain? Who shopped at the morgue this week?”

Hector peeked into my lunch bag. He wasn’t playing along. “Yeah, what do you expect?”

“What does that mean?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I mean, I’m always at your house. I see stuff. Can’t you tell your family’s sort of falling apart? School lunches are a real tip-off.”

“What? You’re nuts.”

“And not even
sort of
falling apart. You actually are. But not all over the place like my cousin’s family. What a circus that is, with the probation and the guardian. No, you guys are being pretty neat about it. So I have to say: dude, well done.”

“Neat? What are you talking about
neat
? We’re fine. You’re nuts.”

Hector shrugged and stuffed a baby carrot into his mouth. “Okay. I’m nuts. Mmm. Vegetables. Someone cares for Hecky.”

I hadn’t looked. I hadn’t seen. But after Hector said that, it was all I could see. And I saw it in hundreds of little things. A comment at dinner one night. My dad having an edge in his voice that I had never noticed before. My mother going out and him coming in and calling her name, not knowing she was already gone.

“I was going to go, too,” Dad said to me, as if asking me to take sides. “I can stand her parents, you know.”

“Sure,” I said. “I know.”

“I can stand them for a few hours,” he said.

“I know.”

And her always redoing things he had just done. Restacking the dishes in the dishwasher. Reordering the cake he had already ordered for my birthday because she assumed he didn’t remember to do it but didn’t check with him to see if he did.

“I thought you forgot” was her explanation.

It made him seem like a loser —
she
made him seem like a loser sometimes. I hated it, but I wasn’t sure what to think.

Was she right?

One thing I did know was that Hector was right. We
were
neat. No yelling. No big scenes. Sometimes my father would drink with supper. Not a lot, a beer or two, but he never used to do that. It made him quieter.

It didn’t help that he kept sliding from one job to the next while Mom kept getting promoted. She worked in a big Boston bank and a couple of years ago had gotten a huge promotion. While Dad was still figuring out what he wanted to be, my mother had known for a long time, and she was doing it in a big way, especially now that I was going into high school. Mark and Becca were teenagers when I was born. She had waited a long time.

When I went upstairs to her room after Dad’s phone call last night, she was ironing a white shirt for me. “It might be fun,” she said. “Florida. After the business with your grandmother is over, I mean. Your friends would love to spend a few days or a week there. And kids make friends fast. It’s a resort city, you know, St. Petersburg.”

“You always say that,” I said. “And a week? Who said a week?”

She turned to me. “I can’t go right now. It’s a busy season coming up. And the St. Louis meeting —”

“St. Louis? I thought you were going to Chicago.”

“St. Louis is after Chicago,” she said. “That’s a lot of nights away from home. But if you’re down there, I won’t worry about you. Either of you.”

“I’ll be okay. I have cable, my computer. Becca’s only in Brookline if I need somebody.”

“Jason, you’re thirteen. I can’t leave you here alone for that long.”

“So I can stay with Hector,” I said. “Besides, Florida in the summer? In two minutes I’ll be a puddle on the sidewalk. Or do they not have sidewalks yet? Is Florida even a state? Isn’t it all submerged, anyway? You know, just, no. I don’t want to. No way.”

“No way? No way?” she said, slamming down the iron and stepping toward me, looking tired, but her face set hard. “Who do you think you are to say ‘no way’ to me? Who do you think I do all this for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You?”

She raised her hand as if to slap me, then dropped it. “Shine your loafers, smartmouth, you’re going.”

She was right. I was a smartmouth. And I had the paperwork to prove it. I was actually named student of the month twice in fifth grade. It all went downhill after Hector crunched his baby carrot.

“So guess what,” I told him on the phone from my room. “I’m going to stupid Florida tomorrow. My grandmother died. My dad’s there already. My mom’s got a business trip to China or somewhere.”

“Wow, your mother traveling. That is so new,” he said. “Here’s some advice. Don’t make eye contact with the old folks, okay? Florida is filled with them, and they’re always looking for new blood. You know, like vampires.”

“But don’t they all have false teeth?”

“Ah, my son,” he said, “you are learning the ways.”

“Yeah. Look. I gotta shine my shoes. Call you from hell.”

Looking out the small window, watching the ground pull farther and farther away below me, I wondered if it would actually be that bad, or if it would be worse.