Thank You for All Things (30 page)

“Where’s Mom?” I ask, suddenly scared that maybe they’ve already exchanged angry words and she’s left—especially when I glance at Oma, whose face is morphing like grown-ups’ faces do when they are talking about something serious and private but then have to shift gears quickly and look chipper because a kid enters the room.

“She was out shopping with Mitzy. I just got a hold of her and she’ll be home soon.”

“I learned to ride a bike, and now I ride seven miles per day,” Milo tells Peter, pumping his hands up and down Feynman’s neck.

“Wow, buddy. And it’s showing too. You’re bulking up.”

Milo pulls back his shoulders to try and make his concave chest look a bit more convex.

I race into the living room to get the book I left on the end table while I sat with Grandpa Sam earlier and bring it to Peter. I don’t need to tell him why. He opens it up at random, points down the page, and reads,
“Thinking is not only a cerebral process: but we also think with our emotions and our bodies—”

“Page thirty-nine, third paragraph!”

Peter whoops, then turns to Milo. “May twenty-ninth, 1962?”

“Tuesday!”

Peter whoops again, then he reaches in his jacket pocket and hands us each one Hershey’s Kiss. I am torn between saving mine and eating it, then decide that if I save it, it says that I don’t trust I’ll ever get another one from him again. So I unravel the foil wrapper and pop it into my
mouth, sucking on the chocolate and saving the crunch of the almond inside for last.

When Mom comes through the door, though, our chatter and laughter stop, and it’s suddenly as if the house itself is holding its breath.

Mom looks pretty in a subtly tiered turquoise skirt I’ve never seen before, flats the color of buttermilk, and a matching shirt. She rotates the turquoise bracelet on her wrist, then smooths the sides of her hair self-consciously (no doubt to flatten it, since Mitzy had moussed it and blown it dry until it was the size of a basketball), as she waits for Peter to move Feynman and rise. Her head is half dipped to the side so that she almost looks shy, and there’s a nervous smile on her face as Peter stands up and shimmies between the table and counter to reach her. He puts his arms out and Mom walks into his hug.

Peter’s hug for Mom is not a rambunctious bear hug, like he gave Milo and me, but one that is as intense and gentle as a deep sigh. Oma tilts her head and smiles—that is, until she sees the price tag dangling from Mom’s armpit. Peter looks at Mom’s lips when he whispers a hello to her, like he wants to kiss her, but he doesn’t. Maybe because Milo and I are watching, or maybe because Mom has suddenly turned her head to harp at Oma, who’s got her head bent right in Mom’s armpit as she uses her teeth to free the price tag’s plastic string.

It’s only mid-afternoon, but Peter hasn’t eaten lunch, so Oma bakes the lasagna she prepared earlier. Once we’re seated, Milo and I chatter as Oma takes a pan from the oven and Mom slices French bread. Peter doesn’t take his eyes off Milo and me as we babble on, but he occasionally reaches out and gives Mom’s arm a quick stroke.

“Guess what I’m going to do, Peter?” Milo doesn’t wait
for Peter to guess. “I’m going to work on beating the world record for reciting pi!”

Peter laughs. “A lofty goal, Milo,” he says. “I’m sure you heard about the high school student who recited it to over eight thousand digits?”

“I did. I read it online. He recited it to 8,784! That’s what gave me the idea to try it.”

“Didn’t a mathematician in Tokyo figure out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places or something like that?” Peter asks.

“He did. In 2002, but he had the help of a supercomputer. That’s cheating. I wonder how far I could get on my own.”

While we eat, Peter and Milo busy themselves talking about Milo’s stupid quest. I don’t participate. Partially because I hate math, but mostly because I’m busy watching Mom’s and Peter’s body language.

I know the gestures that show interest and even love, but unfortunately, from my vantage point at the table, I can’t tell if their pupils are dilated when they steal glances at each other. I let my napkin fall to the floor and glance at their feet as I scoop it up.
Yes!
I shout inside when I see the telltale body language that I was hoping for. Peter’s ankles are crossed, the sole of one shoe pointing toward Mom. Mom’s legs are crossed too, one foot off the floor and pointed at Peter, her shoe dangling from her toes. I’m so happy to see that their feet are positioned like Cupid’s arrows that I come up too quickly and whack my head on the table.

“You okay?” Mom asks, and I nod as I rub my head.

I ask Peter if his niece who’s read
Little Women
fifteen times will be at the wedding. He says yes.

“Hey,” Milo says. “If you don’t have to be in Bayfield for the rehearsal dinner until Friday, you can spend the night tonight, can’t you? You can borrow Lucy’s bike and
ride with me in the morning. We could race. It’s really cold in the mornings, but there’s extra stocking hats here if you don’t have one with you. Gloves too.”

I don’t see Mom slip her shoe back on and stomp on Milo’s foot, but I’m sure she does, because Milo groans an ouch and asks, “What did you do
that
for?”

Mom pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and turns to look at Peter.

“I don’t know. I …” Peter’s eyes are on Mom as he speaks.

“You’re welcome to stay if you’d like,” Oma says. “We have a spare room downstairs.” I hope she says this for Milo’s and my sake, not for Mom’s.

Peter thanks her and then says, “We’ll see.”

Mom is quiet through most of the meal, though she smiles a lot. She picks at her food, carving fork lines into the sauce on her square of lasagna and rearranging her steamed broccoli.

I alternate between watching her and Peter and thinking about all the great things we could do if he was my new dad. “Do you know how to ice skate?” I ask Peter, suddenly realizing that there’s an awful lot I don’t know about him.

Peter laughs. “A little.”

“A little’s enough,” I tell him. “There’s a sled in the basement,” I add. “It used to be Mom’s and Uncle Clay’s. Grandpa Sam used to make toboggans, but there’s none of them here. Do you like to sled? Not that we can do that now, but do you like to?”

“Who doesn’t like to sled?” Peter says. “When I was a kid, my brothers and I went inner tubing down Bottle Rocket Hill every weekend in the winter.” Peter takes his hand from Mom’s arm and brings it to his face to show us a small bubbled scar a quarter of an inch into his hairline. “I
got this as a reminder not to stop and abruptly hug a tree while whizzing down a hill,” he says, and we laugh.

“So your father made toboggans?” Peter says to Mom, after we’re mostly done laughing.

“He did,” she says, stiffening her back against the chair.

“He carved too,” Oma adds. She takes the cardinal off the windowsill and hands it to Peter, then gets up and goes into Milo’s study. She brings back a number of small birds and a ferocious bear that’s standing on a wooden block, paws arched and teeth bared.

“Wow, these are incredible,” Peter says. “He certainly was gifted with his hands.” Mom mutters something under her breath that I don’t catch, but Peter apparently does, because he hands the carvings back to Oma and changes the subject, talking instead about a new class he’ll be teaching next spring.

A
FTER OUR
meal, Oma heads outside to smoke and Mom takes her plate to the sink. We haven’t had dessert yet, but that can wait until the table is cleared and our stomachs aren’t so full, Oma says.

“Come see my study Peter,” Milo says, and Peter says he’d love to. I get up to follow, but Mom tells me to help her clean off the table. “How stereotypically sexist,” I grumble. “I have to help clean the kitchen, but Milo, being a boy, doesn’t. I get Peter next!” I call after Milo.

“So?” Oma asks as she comes back inside seconds later, smelling like an ashtray.

“So what?” Mom asks.

“Is Peter staying?”

Mom shrugs. “If he wants to, I suppose.” Oma and I share subtle grins.

“I’ll put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room,” Mom says, “just in case.” She talks slowly, deliberately, so I don’t miss her point that Peter is going to sleep in the guest room rather than with her. It’s her ongoing feeble attempt to keep the delicate moral fiber of her young, impressionable children from unraveling.

“You don’t have to do that anymore, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend that Peter won’t be sleeping in your bed. I read Freud, Mom, and you know how preoccupied he was with sex. Besides, I’m not a little kid anymore. I’ll be getting my period soon. I’ve even been feeling a little crampy lately. I’m old enough to know that adults who aren’t married have sex.”

Mom stares at me with shock, and Oma nods. “She does have a point, honey,” she says, and Mom tells her to stay out of her business, then adds, “You too, young lady.”

I don’t wait for Peter to come out of Milo’s room when Oma has our chocolate silk pie on plates. I go to the study. “Dessert is served,” I say, eager to interrupt them—that is, until I see Milo’s animated expression as he dabs his pencil tip against a graph he’s made. “You see,” he begins, “if A represents …” I study Peter for a microsecond before he looks up at me. He seems genuinely interested as he studies Milo’s paper, and I admire him for mustering up that interest for Milo’s sake. As much as I want Peter all to myself, I know the importance of a father figure in a boy’s life—so he doesn’t grow up to wear women’s lacy panties or something weird like that.

I go stand next to Peter while he’s leaned over Milo’s desk, but I don’t interrupt. Peter gives my braid a soft tug, then drapes his arm across me as he listens to Milo drone on about God knows what. I study Peter’s ear: firm and well
shaped, and void of wax, even deep into the canal. I make a mental note to examine the ear canals of any potential boyfriend I might have in the future, then I study the stubble over his jaw and chin. The minuscule hairs jutting from his skin go in one direction in certain patches, then brush in another direction in other places, almost like crop circles drawn by a blind, microscopic-size alien. Peter feels me staring at him and turns to me and smiles.

I
HAVE TO
wait until almost forever before it’s my turn to hog Peter: until dessert and coffee are finished, and Oma goes back outside to smoke, and Mom gets busy doing the dessert dishes and scrubbing the lasagna pan that was soaking.

“You want to meet Grandpa Sam?” I ask him.

“I’d like that,” he says.

I take his hand and lead him to Grandpa Sam’s room. Grandpa is lying flat on his back, and there’s a drip bag stand next to him, the plastic bag filled with brown thick liquid that looks even more repulsive than the concoctions Oma used to whip up for him, if that’s possible. The brown sludge moves down a tube that disappears around his torso, under his blanket. “That’s how he eats now, because he can’t swallow anymore,” I explain. “He got the tube put in at the hospital yesterday. I didn’t go with. Mom didn’t either, but Oma did. They picked up Grandpa Sam in a medical van his nurse, Barbara, had sent over. Oma rode to the hospital with Barbara. Mom didn’t want it done, but Aunt Jeana decides those things. I felt bad for not going to hold his hand while they did it, but Mom said it was surgery so I couldn’t have gone inside anyway.”

I sit down on the bed next to Grandpa Sam and place
my hand on his chest, right over his heart, and feel his breathing quiet the best it can. A calm comes over him. “Did you see that? I think he knows I’m here, even if he can’t show it outwardly.” Peter nods and smiles at me without showing his teeth.

“He sleeps most of the time now, but you can wake him up if you try hard enough. I still talk to him, even if he doesn’t talk back anymore.”

“I’m glad you do,” Peter says.

“When we first came here, he could walk some and talk a bit. He could drive too—or so he thought.” I start laughing and ask Peter if Mom told him about Grandpa Sam’s getaway and parade down Main Street. He says no, so I tell him the story. Peter tips his head back and laughs and laughs.

When we get done laughing, I tell Peter, “I like having a grandpa, but I’m not going to have him much longer. Before Aunt Jeana dismissed hospice, their volunteer gave me this.” I take a little white pamphlet,
The Dying Experience
, from the nightstand and hand it to Peter. “It explains what someone looks like and how they act as they’re nearing death. They say in there just what Oma says: that Grandpa Sam has one foot in this world and one foot in the next. You know what else Oma said? That a lot of times, as people are dying, they talk to people on the other side. Ghosts. Well, Oma doesn’t call them that, but that’s what they are. Dead people like their parents, siblings, and friends, who come to help take their spirits to the other side. Mom says that’s hogwash and that it’s nothing more than their failing minds wandering.”

“What do you think?” Peter asks.

“I think that I hope Oma’s right and that someone nice comes for him.”

We sit a few more minutes with Grandpa Sam, then I ask Peter if he’d like to see my room. He says yes, and we leave Grandpa Sam lying in the soft glow of the night-light and head upstairs.

“This was Mom’s old room,” I tell Peter as he walks the perimeter of the room. “I found her old notebooks in that closet right there. Notebooks she wrote as a kid. And I read them. That’s how I found out that Grandpa Sam was mean when he was younger and that he had a girlfriend. That’s also how I learned that Oma used to be a drunk.”

Saying the words out loud makes them sound even worse than they sounded in my head.

Peter goes to my bed and sits down. He pats the mattress beside him, and I sit down too. He puts his arm around me.

“Lucy,” he says. “People make mistakes. Sometimes very bad ones. But people change too. Sometimes.”

“I don’t want to think of Grandpa Sam as bad,” I say, “but sometimes I do. And I can’t touch the hand that I think he hit Oma with.”

We sit quietly for a moment, then he says, “Did you do my assignment I asked you to do? On playing?”