Thank You for All Things (12 page)

“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.

T
HE 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.”

“I start at seven. It’s after seven.”

It isn’t.

“Lucy,” Oma whispers. “Don’t.”

“No, Grandpa. You don’t work anymore. Sorry. But maybe you can tell me about the jobs you’ve had when we get inside, okay?”

Grandpa lifts his finger and points to his forehead. “My brain’s broke,” he says, and I can’t tell if it’s a question or a statement, but I say, “Yes.”

I take his hand and help lead him back to the house and into his lift chair. His chest is heaving by the time we get
him settled, and his face is contorted into a sob, even though his eyes are dry and no sound comes from him.

Twenty minutes later, Oma has Grandpa Sam reclining in his chair, and she’s standing over him, her opened hands hovering a couple of inches above him while some twangy Japanese music plays from a beat-up boom box. I go to the table and spread out the textbooks I brought from home, but none of them grabs my interest at the moment. “Sam, don’t bat at my hands like that. I’m opening your chakras,” Oma scolds.

With Oma busy clearing Grandpa Sam’s chakras, Milo lost in his books in the study, and my own reading dull as plain toast, I glance at the stairway off the kitchen and bite my lip. Then, without giving myself time to ponder what kind of karma will boomerang back to me for this one, I rip off my shoes and head up the stairs in stocking feet, walking gently because the boards are prone to creaking.

I open the closet door slowly so it won’t creak either, and without moving the stack, I untie the pink cord of yarn that Oma tied around them. I pull out one of the spiral notebooks, closing the door quietly behind me, and take it to Mom’s old bed.

The notebook I grab is blue, and the cover is worn bare in spots where an eraser rubbed the color off. The date—December 21 to January 5, 1985—is written over one erased bar and, above it, Mom’s name. I quickly calculate Mom’s age to be ten, when she was in the fifth grade.

I feel like a window peeker when I open it, yet I don’t stop myself. Not when I see the childish penmanship inside: fat, round letters, with circles for the dots over
i
’s. Pencil-drawn wreaths and Christmas trees decorate the top of the page.

I run my fingers over the paper, feeling the small creases her pencil chiseled years ago. I feel as though I’ve gone back in time to meet a potential new friend. One who, it just so happens, will be my mother when she’s grown.

I got the only A today on our chapter test in Mr. Thorton’s class. Mitzy got a C+, but she didn’t glare at me like that Trudy Millard did. I hate Trudy. I hope she cuts herself when she trips over those big feet and stabs her buck teeth so far into her bottom lip that doctors can’t dislodge them. Then she’d have to shut her ugly face and stop telling me I’m a cheater when I do better than her and stop calling Mitzy the “Pygmy Pixie.”

Ma told Dad my grade while we were at the table. Dad was shoveling forkfuls of potatoes and gravy dotted with corn kernels into his mouth (it’s so gross the way he mixes his food!)
, The Timber Times
folded in half and held to his side so he could read without dipping the paper in his plate. Ma pointed to my ace paper hanging on the fridge. Dad didn’t look up when he told me to keep it up, get a good education so nobody can keep me down.

I looked over at his work boot butted up against the leg of the table. Dad used to let Clay stand on them when he was little, then he’d take Clay’s hands and walk him around the room. I don’t know why I thought of that when Ma told Dad about my paper, but I did.

I skim the other entries, but there’s nothing in them, it seems, other than more of her good grades, the snotty remarks Trudy made, and that she and Mitzy made s’mores at Mitzy’s house. So I get up and grab another notebook from the stack and leaf through it:

December 19, 1989:

Mom is fourteen.

I hate Trudy Millard! She knows I like Brandon Wills, and that’s exactly why she saw to it that she got his name for our gift exchange. Mrs. Billows said we could exchange names ourselves but that it had to be with someone besides our best friend.

It’s my own fault. Brandon asked me if I wanted to, right after lunch. I wasn’t expecting him to ask me, and while I stood there acting like an idiot because I was in shock, Trudy butted right in and said, “I’ll exchange names with you, Brandon!”

Trudy was wearing a new burgundy shaker sweater. I hated my sweater today—the grass-green one, unstylishly short, with hard, nubby lint balls on it that I picked for the whole bus ride. No matter how much plucking I do, there they are, sticking to my sweater like the boogers Clay rolls and tosses at me.