Close To Home

My grandmother died on a cold, grey day in November. We didn’t know until the next day, when old Mr. Parson, who lives down the lane, went to check on her and found her dead in the yard with her boots on.

When Mom called, the first thing I thought was how much I would miss Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s house. I grew up in my grandmother’s kitchen, Thanksgivings and summers, in boots or barefoot.  We were close the way women get when they’ve been through hard times together. Losing my grandmother was like losing a piece of me.

The second thing I thought was Oh, my God, how am I going to manage three children in the car for the four-hour drive over the Colorado Rockies, a stay in a strange hotel, their first funeral, one where they would surely c1y because I would be crying, and then four hours in the car back again the next day.

“When is the funeral?” I asked.

Mom’s voice was quiet but steady.  She had already told me she didn’t intend to cry. “Saturday, I expect.”  Grandma always said women in our family are supposed to be tougher than boot leather, stronger than grief.  Often we are stronger than the men we choose and that can be a problem.  Grandma was a widow for 28 years, Mom raised my sister and me by herself, and I was raising my three girls since their father decided he was tired of being a family man three years ago last August.

“Friday would be a good day to travel,” I said.  Tia’s kindergarten class got out at noon.  If I took Katie and Sarah out of school at lunch, and the weather held, we’d be down off of narrow twisty Rabbit Ears Pass and checked into the Holiday Inn in Craig before dusk.  If the weather didn’t hold, the driving could get seriously bad.  Friday was also good because I knew Matt could get the afternoon off, if he asked. Yes, Friday would be good.

I knew Matt was home, so I waited the six and a half rings it took him to answer. “How was your day?” I asked.  Matt always listened better when he’d already had his say, and today I wanted him to listen.  After he went on for awhile, I thought it was time enough to change the subject.

“My grandmother died yesterday.”

“Ahh.”  Matt dragged it out, slow and soothing.  I was glad I had called, glad I wasn’t going to be alone with my grief and my girls. “Jody, I’m sorry.”

I didn’t intend to cry, at least not until later. “The funeral’s on Saturday,” I said. “I thought we could drive over on Friday.”  Unasked, I let the question float out like a wisp of cloud.

“You’re going then?”

Idiot, like I’m not going to go to my grandmother’s funeral.  She had always been there for me, when Katie and Sarah and Tia were born, and when I ran out of money in college, one semester short of the degree that would get me a job better than any my mother ever had a chance for. And when I tried to fall apart when my ex-husband walked out on the girls and me, she was there to remind me that I had children to take care of and that the women in my family have more staying power than most any man any of us had ever seen or were likely to see.  “Yes,” I said. “I’m going.”

“Will your ex keep the kids for you or what?”

“I’m not going to ask.”

“Don’t you think he’ll do it?”

After 18 months of hearing me tell stories, Matt didn’t much care for my ex-husband, but then again neither did I, so I let that go by.

“I want the girls with me.”  They had never stayed at my grandmother’s house, that was my only regret, that they had all been born after my grandmother decided the farm wasn’t a safe place for city kids.  I wanted them to see it before it was sold out of the family. I wish I’d had the money to buy it. “This is their family, too.”

“So, you’ll leave on Friday, then,” he said. “What time?” Last year on my birthday, my sister had kept the girls so Matt and I could go out to dinner. He said I deserved wine and candlelight on my birthday, and he was going to make sure I got both. He gave me a small wooden box, a box he had made and painted with sea shells and gulls. When I opened it, there was a · gold sand dollar on a chain, nestled in red tissue paper. Next birthday, I thought, it might be a ring.  I twisted the chain around my finger and asked, “Matt, would you go with us, help me drive?”

I heard his lighter snap. He inhaled deeply, then let it out. I could just see the smoke curl up to the ceiling, dingy yellow from all the years Matt had meant to but hadn’t quit smoking, and I knew it wouldn’t matter when I decided to leave.  I waited to hear how he would tell me that.

“I don ‘t think that’s a good idea, Jody.”

Once I get started, I can be a lot like my grandmother and my mother are with men, stubborn and unforgiving, sometimes hurting no one but myself.  I knew he wasn’t going to help me, but I wasn’t going to let him get away without saying it.

“Why not?”

“It’s just not a good idea.”

“You could help me drive.  It’s a four-hour trip.”  I choked the whine out of my voice. Each way. And you’re going to make me drive it alone.

“It’s just not a good idea,” he said again.

Maybe I couldn’t quite believe he was really going to let me go alone. Or maybe all that sorrow, all that loss I was holding inside, holding until after all the arrangements had been made, all the things that needed taking care of were taken care of, maybe all that had gotten inside the boot leather, had softened me up a bit, made me stupid, but I asked again. “Matt, please.” Please help me do this hard thing.  Please come with me and drive so I can tell stories to my daughters about their great grandmother, so I don’t have to be the only grownup with three tired, hungry, con­ fused little girls, so I can get ready to see my mother cry.  So I don’t have to be alone at night with my grief in a strange bed in a hotel room so far from home.  So I can start to believe that not all men are like my ex-husband. I could hear all of that in my voice. I don’t think Matt could and I don’t think it would have made any difference, at least not in how it turned out, even if he had.

“Jody, no!”  He should have left it at that. I might have forgiven him for the sake of peace, for the sake of our future together I thought about, for the sake of not sleeping alone.  But he said, “I don’t want to intrude on your family.”

Intrude on my family.   My family that he’d managed for 18 months to avoid meeting. My family who had been there, in Grandma’s kitchen for Thanksgiving, on the front porch in summer, year after year.  My mom, my sister, my aunt and cousins. My family.

“Matt-“

He talked over the top of me. “I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s not like you were close to her or anything.  You haven’t visited her once, not one time, since I’ve known you, so how close could you be?”

The drive west out of Denver, through the Eisenhower Tunnel, then north to Kremmling, was long, but the weather and the roads were clear for the first three hours.

Tia sat next to me in the front seat, keeping me company by keeping quiet.  Katie and Sarah read and talked and were bored in the back seat, but they didn’t fight and they only asked once, just as we passed through Dillon, to stop for ice cream and to go to the bathroom.

The rain started after we were down off the pass; it didn’t turn to sleet until we cleared Steamboat Springs, 45 miles shy of my grandmother’s house. Suddenly, in this weather, it was another hour-and-a-half away.

After we checked in, the girls went down to the hotel game room with a fistful of quarters among them and a promise from me that we would all go in the pool together later, once we were settled.

I unpacked my black sweater and the long black skirt I’d brought, shook them out, and hung the skirt in the closet, on one of those weird wooden hangars, the kind you can’t steal because they come apart into two pieces, leaving the ring on the rod and in your hand a worthless triangle of wood, sort of a boomerang that never gets thrown, so it never needs to come back around. I put the sweater in a drawer, hid the remote control to the TV (that would have been more than I could stand), and looked at the phone.  My sister was staying out at the house with my mother and my aunt.  My cousins, both coming with husbands and children, hadn’t checked into the hotel yet.

I wanted to just sit and cry, those great heaving sobs I’d been holding back since Mom called, the kind where you want someone to hold you and to hand you Kleenex when you’re done, but I still had to deal with dinner, room service or the dining room, or something. I didn’t think I could face fast food, even though the girls would be begging for burgers and fries. Being alone filled the hotel room, spreading out over the chenille spread, the rough woven curtains, the standard issue white towels that looked soft but weren’t.  I twisted the sand dollar chain around one finger, picked up the phone and dialed 8 for an outside, long distance line.

I didn’t cry until the funeral started. After, I stopped long enough to drive, headlights on, to the cemetery for the graveside service.  My grandmother’s casket sat low to the ground, next to my grandfather’s grave, which was obscured by the mound of sod that would be rolled out by the cemetery workers after the family and other mourners left.

 Sweet Tia sat with my mother and my aunt on a folding aluminum riser whose legs sank into the soggy ground.  The sky began to spit little bits of wet that couldn’t decide if they wanted to be rain or snow. I started to cry again when Tia leaned her head against my mother’s shoulder.

Matt had picked up the phone on the third ring.

“How was your day?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.  “How was the drive?”

“Long,” I said.  “Lonely.” Underneath this I’m thinking please, please, please-  ·

“Jody,” he said.  “I don’t do funerals.”

Something inside me shifted, and I let go of the sand dollar chain.  “What do you mean you  don’t do funerals?”

“I mean I don’t do funerals.  Not since my mother died.”

Right.  Matt’s sainted mother had been dead for over 10 years.  In the time I’d  known him, his days were always harder than mine, and insults and slights cut him deeper.  That was bad enough, but now his grief was going to be bigger and grander than mine as well.

“Goddamned doctors,” he said. “If I had been there it never would have happened.”  Matt told everyone, whether they wanted to hear or not, whether they had heard the story before or not, that it was the doctors’ fault, giving her too high a dose of the wrong drug.  “They killed her,” he said.  Matt’s sister told me once it was alcohol and cigarettes that killed her, just like it would kill Matt if he didn’t quit.  She said Matt and his mother fought like cats and dogs over her drinking, so bad that she didn’t even want him there at the hospital toward the end, all because he just wouldn’t let up on her.  His voice, rough from the cigarettes, broke into a righteous cough.  “And we were close.  We were so close.”

Katie and Sarah, unbearably beautiful in the drizzling rain, stood with me after the graveside service.

Tia walked with my mom back to the long black limousine.  I could just see her boots dangling out the door, swinging back and forth.  I knew she’d wait for me to come fetch her, that she’d want to ride with me out to the house, where my grand­ mother’s friends and neighbors would come to eat cold cuts and cake and swap stories.  Tia wore the sand dollar chain, which now held the tiny shamrock charm Mom gave her to remember her great grandmother by. I had left the sand dollar next to the phone in the hotel room.

I turned back to my grandmother’s casket and my gran father’s grave to say goodbye.  I was ready to go now, out to the house, where I would have plenty of stories of my own to add to the telling of my grandmother’s life.

Sarah and Katie walked with me all the way back to the car, their small hands soft and warm and comforting in mine. Although I didn’t feel it now, I knew I wasn’t done with being lonely. But I was done with Matt, and that was fine with me. After all, it’s not like we were close.