THOMAS LARSON

I.

In the last year of his life, Grandpa Wallin quit driving. For years he had tooled his big Plymouth over the beveled streets, the grey, rough asphalt dark from rain or silvered by the sun. When my brothers and I rode in the back seat, he’d crab, for God’s sake, stop all that commotion. On Sundays he used to ride with us to our ritual breakfasts, a family outing so Grandma didn’t have to cook. One day, we were half way out the door and he said he didn’t feel well and was staying home. He wasn’t sickly. A retired newspaper ad salesman of 53 years, he seemed even at home to be at work, putting on a white shirt every day and sitting in his chair, reading. He seemed as stolid as ever to my nine-year-old mind. He might have been tired, though I don’t remember him napping except, maybe, when the book got dull and it rested on his stomach. (The man checked out four or five books a week from the library, Zane Grey and Frank Yerby, and read religiously.)

Someone said he might have had indigestion, especially after my family’s breathless eating when we descended on our grandparents every holiday. Grandma Wallin would press him to say what was wrong, but he didn’t say. He fluttered a hand at her. Don’t fuss. Leave me be, woman, he’d say.

On the Sundays without Grandpa, my father would drive our station wagon, with Grandma (whom he called “Mom”), Mother, my two brothers and me, to the Sweden House, an elegant restaurant in a huge Victorian mansion. It was on the outskirts of town, Rockford, Illinois, Mother’s parents’ home for more than a half-century. We went to the Sweden House because Grandma preferred their smorgasbord. The cooks mimicked her specialty, Swedish meatballs: two pounds lean ground beef, two eggs, onions, and homemade bread crumbs. While waiting for a table, Mother would sigh and my father would steer us to a surefire distraction—a stereoscope with photos of rich Swedish women, dressed in brocaded gowns, watching their children play croquet on the lawns of great estates.

When they called out “Wallin, party of six,” my father would look at my older brother Steve accusingly. Dad knew he’d rush the food, a cowboy to the chuck wagon. Steve, the jokester, had to be dealt with, so he got to go first. In line, he bobbed, impatient and doltish. My younger brother Jeffrey was directed next to go. He acted as if he were waiting for communion. “Tommy,” Dad said, “you stay until we get back. Understand?” I said I did. I took his direction, you might say, well. When Steve returned with the food pyramided on his plate, he pretended to attack it like a wolf.

Grandma’s smile at Steve said he wasn’t a bad boy, just rowdy. She was a sunny-dispositioned woman. I liked her, in part, because she was far less fretful than Mother. Rotund, sweets-loving, Grandma was a wonderful cook who patted the Swedish meatballs to life. She had a delightful, twittery laugh. Once, when Mother and Jeffrey were out, Steve played a joke on Grandma, I think just to elicit her laughter. In a long, thin box, one that held a watch and its unclasped band, he cut a marble-size hole in the bottom to stick his middle finger through and onto a swath of cotton so it looked like a finger in a coffin. Next, he mushed a squirt of ketchup over the appendage. He ran to Grandma, excited as a colt. “Look what I found in the yard, somebody’s finger!” Grandma, her eyesight poor, was shocked. “Whose is it?” “I don’t know,” Steve said. “Maybe somebody’s been murdered?” “Stevie, do we need to call the police?” Abruptly, she saw through the ruse. She started laughing gleefully. She kept laughing. Which the three of us did until Mother came back.

On the Sunday before Decoration Day, 1959, we were sitting together (without Grandpa), the aroma of Scandinavian food before us—the cardamon rolls, the sweet potatoes, the sauce-covered meatballs—and we all, Grandma included, ate hungrily. Soon, after a few minutes of silent chewing, Grandma put her big silver fork down.

“Not as good as yours, huh Mom?” my father said.

“No, they’re fine,” she said. “I want to make sure we have something for Grandpa to eat.”

I noticed a droopiness in her eyes then. She seemed worried as though what we had done—by driving off, by enjoying the food (we always enjoyed the food)—was to forget him. I had no idea that a person we had just left was forgettable. Since he wasn’t coming, I thought, we should just accept his choice. But there it was. A kind of drag upon our eating.

Once in a while Mother, but only when prompted, would talk about her father—not when we were around him, of course, but back in our hometown, Middletown, in southern Ohio. It wasn’t so much the stories that were memorable as it was the egg-like way she recalled him.

He would say to her that the whole reason they had so much and others had so little (this, during the Depression) was he never missed a day of work. He was a stolid man. He saved his money. He never drank. He knew his limitations. He avoided physical labor, put on gloves to use a hammer. He would talk at dinner about trials in the paper; historical markers he wanted to visit on driving trips through Illinois; his disapproval of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was, he said, ruining the country. Mother said she was always trying to please him by getting good grades and hoping, just once, that he would offer her a word of encouragement. She would bring home A’s on her report card and he had the same reaction: he got out his wallet and gave her a dollar bill for each A. “Here you are, Dorothy. And don’t spend it all in one place.” (Grandpa had been paying me for A’s, too, with the same line, but I never minded.) After dinner, he would tell the women (his sister, an old maid, lived with them) to give him a little peace and quiet; he couldn’t hear the words he was reading. The radio didn’t play. So much of it just foolishness. Mother said that in a house full of women there wasn’t, except for his desk, a corner that he could call his own. He parked the big Plymouth in a garage that smelled of spider webs and dried wood; there, between the exposed two-by-fours, Grandpa hung his license plate collection, a rainbow of colors dating back to 1919, Illinois, Land of Lincoln. It was the one place that exuded his presence, more strongly than any other, even though he was only there to back out and pull in the car.

Soon Dad was asking for doggie bags (in the plural), which signaled my brothers and me to give up something on our plates. I watched Grandma load her meatball (mine was half-eaten and I gave it up, too), knowing this bounty would arrive on a platter later as part of our supper.

Dad paid the bill from his cash-fat wallet. Back in the station wagon, we took our same positions: Grandma in the front seat; Steve and Mother surrounded me in the back; Jeffrey was in the way-back. Mother’s head scarf was gone now that it was cold and the windows were up. Steve kept disrupting my peace by pulling himself forward to gawk at every store and sign of a sale.

Dad said that we wanted to take the long way home, which meant passing through the poor end of town where we would see the woman on the corner. He liked driving by the woman who stood each day, without fail, in front of her home, pad in hand, noting the cars that passed. We had seen her before—it was something of a ritual when my family came to Rockford. We would pass by the woman and watch her mark us down. I craned my head in anticipation, felt the tires gain the slight hill as we approached. I think it had been a year since we’d seen her.

We knew the story. But Dad liked to query Grandma about the woman; Steve would say that the whole gruesome tale sounded to him like The Man With the Golden Arm. Meant to scary the be-Jesus out of us.

“There she is,” Dad exclaimed.

“Oh, yes, still there,” Grandma said.

“Tell the boys about it,” he said.

“Oh, I will, John,” she said, “but let’s not tarry.” I liked how my father and Grandma Wallin would discuss things, a play of opinions that I followed line by line.

Right off, Steve started intoning, “‘Who’s got my golden arm,’” in his fright voice. Dad shushed him.

“Now you boys see what she’s doing,” Grandma said. “She’s keeping track of all the cars. The different colors, the models, the years.” It was true. She was jotting down the Buicks, the Fords, the Ramblers; the robin-egg blues, the froggy greens, the black-and-white two-tones. They were the older, pre-1950 makes since Rockford was a Nordic town, its folk Protestant and hardscrabble. “She’s looking for her husband’s Oldsmobile,” Grandma said, “white with silver trim, 1946. She’s expecting him today. If not today, then tomorrow.” The woman was waiting for him to come home.

“How do you know which car it was?” Dad asked.

“Everyone knows the car. It was in all the papers.” Grandma paused. “Don’t drive by so slow that she sees us, John,” she said.

Dad slowed, but not too much. Ahead, we saw her: she was wearing glasses with chains, big U’s dangling on the sides of her face. Her floral dress was ironed. “Look,” Grandma said, “she’s got her pearls on.” I thought I heard a twittery laugh escape from Grandma but it was my brother. “You boys know she’s out here most days, rain or shine.”

Indeed we knew. I knew, and it haunted me—the way I supposed soldiers were haunted by seeing their buddies get shot and die right next to them. (My father had been three years in the war, post-Pearl Harbor, but never talked about it. Not once.) Each morning this woman made a public ritual of expecting her husband home from a business trip. But just as she would never stop waiting for him, he was never coming home. Not now, not ever. The police, the woman’s neighbors, her family, her pastor, all, of course, had told her that the man was dead, that the Olds, two states away, had careened down a steep embankment, turned over several times, blew up, and burned. The gasoline-fed fire meant nothing was left to casket. Only the teeth were salvageable and that, said the newspaper, proved his identity. And yet, for the woman, as Grandma said, all such evidence was untrue. “Without his body,” she would say, “how can anyone say he’s gone?”

“It’s unbelievable,” my father said, both hands on the wheel. “Eight years devoted to a ghost.” He sounded dismissive. He said he could understand her sadness but, he added, “her mind has to be gone.”

That was the reason, the only one, this woman had been waiting for her husband for so long. My father sounded sure. He always spoke with authority. It was grounded, I would find out from him a few years later, in a disbelief in God. (One reason why Sunday mornings were for sleeping in and smorgasbord.) He didn’t buy the God talk. The fantasy of miracles. The lazy nod to the supernatural. He was adamant about it, almost religious. Where was the evidence of God, of divine intervention in the sufferer’s life (somebody had to be in need before God, the mystery man, would show)? My father intoned all this with a mocking glee. What people had to show for their surety were felt-figure story-boards and smote-clapped tales from a bendable leather-bound book with gilt-edged, translucent pages. God himself had no physicality, no body. He was only and all representation. Show me the body of God, and I’ll believe.

My father saw it this way. And had I been capable of pressing deeper I might have agreed with him, that a designless, accidental universe explained the husband’s death. But I was young, and my rough sense of the mysterious was still intact. I couldn’t account for what drove this woman out to the corner year after year. That many years couldn’t have been an accident. In fact, she was a kind of proof of her husband’s being. Just because he was not physically present didn’t mean he didn’t exist. (Could she feel his presence, and we couldn’t?) The woman was herself a living reminder of what my father, the police, the reporters, a mortician, and a dentist had all discounted. These were wholly different visions of reality, one for those sitting in the pews, one for most of those driving by in the family wagon.

Mother’s leg was vibrating against mine. The sensation awakened me. Suddenly, I could feel the difference between my father and Grandma Wallin, and it set me on an edge. It was a kind of isolation I hadn’t known. What was it? That only when your mind was gone would you be able to bear what you otherwise couldn’t bear. It made the woman on the corner seem more, not less, of a threat.

Grandma had her own take on the woman. “But John,” she said, “if she’s lost her mind, why would she be out here every day? Wouldn’t she lock herself in the house or be in an asylum? It’s not crazy to wait. She’s not hurting anyone.”

“You’re right,” he said. “She’s not hurting anyone. Except, maybe, herself.”

Suddenly Steve chimed, “Cuckoo,” in my ear, and I flinched. I looked at him, three years older and (so he claimed) smarter than me. He said it again, “Cuckoo.” His head tick-tocked. His eyes went left-right like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The car eased a moment like a power boat just before it touches the dock. Dad pressed the accelerator ever so lightly. Mother’s leg stilled.

“I know why a woman like that would wait,” Grandma said. “Waiting for him keeps him alive.” I thought of Grandpa Wallin: he was in his chair, dozing, the book fallen from his lap and onto the floor where it landed half-opened, one page caught and folded back against itself. Grandma continued. “She has faith, John, and faith keeps her going.” Again I thought of Grandpa: now his arm had fallen to the side of the chair and it dangled like a fish on a hook, twenty minutes out of water.

“Come on, John,” Grandma said, “we need to get home.”

I gazed back at the woman. She had just glanced at us, noted down our beige Ford station wagon, the family car. This was our car, Ohio plates, white letters on a red background, the car Mother had found at the dealer’s lot, had coveted and waited for until Dad had earned and they had saved the money. Saving money wasn’t faith; saving was doing. Faith was for those who couldn’t make do for themselves. And yet that was way too pat. Faith had a translucent quality to it; for those who grieved, it was incontestable. What the woman on the corner wasn’t saying I might have heard her thinking were I alone and quiet enough: He’s alive, he’s alive. Today is the day I will see him. Her faith was a beautiful dream, a dream she shared with us by coming out to the corner. That’s why she was there. It didn’t matter that my father and I and probably my brother doubted her, that Mother was ambivalent, that Grandma was sympathetic. (My four-year-old brother must have sensed something that day, the smell of lilacs, the audacity of adults, all his own.) Faith was insisting that the woman was never going to know that her husband was never coming home.

Rushing in ahead of Grandma, I found Grandpa at his desk, sliding his pen back in his penholder. “We’re home, Grandpa,” I said. He didn’t turn to look at me, rather he laced his fingers together and circled a thumb on his other palm. I saw him press the palm then, as though he might push a hole through it. I backed away.

II.

Almost six months later, in Middletown, where my family and I lived, it was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. It was still early, and Grandma and Grandpa Wallin had left our home maybe an hour before, returning to Illinois, a day-long trip. Grandpa had driven the eight-hour trip the previous Wednesday and now, having left at 7 a.m. without breakfast (it wasn’t necessary, he had said), they were only 30 miles out, near Eaton, Ohio, when a teenager who’d been drinking all night hit their big Plymouth head-on.

Miraculously, the three had serious but not life-threatening injuries. Grandma Wallin—in the time before seat belts—suffered a fractured left foot and a broken right leg; she would be in bed for months and would have trouble walking thereafter. Grandpa Wallin had slammed against the steering wheel hard; he had a broken knee and he bled internally. They were rushed to a hospital in Richmond, Indiana, where a doctor performed surgery on Grandpa. Later that day, the doctor directed questions to my parents (Grandma was sedated). Had the old man complained about a pain in his abdomen? No. Had you seen him doubled over? No. Had he been walking slowly? Refused food? No, why? (I heard all this in my parents’ living-room conversations or surmised from their phone talk.) Then the doctor said, the old man’s pain must be incredible. He’s probably been that way for months. What way, doctor? He has cancer, the doctor said. Cancer in his pancreas. How is that possible? We don’t know, he said. Cancer just happens. Can he be cured? No, it’s too far along. But why didn’t he tell us? Surely he must have known. Yes, the doctor said, you would think. As sick as he was. You would think he would have known. (I remember thinking my mother would react. Cry or exclaim, No. But she didn’t. She expressed no anger, no hope, no alarm. Nor did she or my father broach the obvious. They managed, and they expected my brothers and me to follow suit.)

After Grandma and Grandpa were transferred to a hospital in Middletown, Mother visited on her own during the week. On Saturday, my parents, my two brothers, and I went to see her. Grandpa was in a separate room, and we (us boys) couldn’t see him. But when I saw Grandma, her transformation shocked me.

That day, entering her room (beds and tables and chairs were on casters; the grey linoleum floor glistened like ice on a driveway), the grandmother who I relied on to be the same was no more. Her injuries were worse than I had imagined. Her blue face bruises hadn’t healed; her smock was stained with spilled coffee and applesauce; her arms were like puppet arms, the strings scissored. How beaten she seemed. I stood beside the bed and touched the hem of the sheet. When she tried to talks, I could tell her spirit was gone. That bird-like laugh I loved had fled. I hadn’t known a person could be one way one day, the opposite way the next.

Grandma was very tired but her questions persisted. Where is he, John? Isn’t he getting better? We can only hope, Dad said. Where is he? He’s recovering. Why can’t he be in here with me? Mother frowned and shook her head. The doctors were doing what they could, Dad said. What’s wrong with him, John? There’s nothing wrong. He’s got to recover from the surgery.

We visited again. Grandma told us that she had been rolled in to visit Grandpa. She talked to him. He didn’t answer. She said his name. Clarence, Clarence. He’s asleep? my little brother asked. He’s asleep, my father said. Just then Steve bumped a table—it rattled and slid. Dad glared at him. I could tell my brother hated all this solemnity. But I was calm. I was beside a lake at dusk. The quieter I was the more alive the lake became.

Then, a Saturday two weeks after Christmas, when we had finished breakfast, a mix of Velveeta omelets and white toast-cum-grape jelly that we devoured, my father put his elbows on the table and said that Grandpa’s cancer was “bigger than he was.” Does Grandma know? Steve wanted to know. Grandma, he said, had been told about the cancer. He said she wept a long time and then told my father something he didn’t know. That she had known it. What? She had known it all along. Known that Grandpa was dying. You mean in the hospital? Steve asked. Yes, in the hospital. But also before. Before the accident? Before. How? Steve insisted. She was too distraught to say any more, Dad said. Steve piped up that he figured Grandpa had been sick a long time. He said Grandpa didn’t want Grandma to fuss. He said Grandpa was always—and then my father said, Steve, not now.

The next week I didn’t go to the hospital. I had school and I was busy with my own things. Mother went during the day to visit Grandma, and she wasn’t there when I came home. Steve was at the Y, where he would play pool and announce the shots and the pockets in which the balls would drop, though the balls seldom obliged. Jeff was at a neighbor’s house. I would head for my room—I had a homemade crystal radio that a buddy from Cub Scouts had showed me how to build: a coil and a set of wires hooked to a speaker from a broken turntable and another set of wires that ran through a crack in the window up the side of the house to a little antenna my dad had helped me put up. For some reason, the radio worked better when I cracked the window open. From the crack, the cold blew in while I searched for Top 40 songs. I played with the radio, the chill upon me. I heard lots of police talk, which I had to deduce: a fire in a warehouse had a number, sirens in the background, the strangely calm voices of the hook-and-ladder crew: “Seventy-seven at the scene . . . subjects are trapped . . . require assistance . . . over.” I loved that little radio. I could sit for long periods, doting on the copper coil in the quiet of my room, picking up the voices and hearing how clear and authoritative and inside a world that had seduced me. Time would stop in the moment I was glued to my set. Which would last, who knows how long. Then the moment of realization came, inside a bigger bubble of awakening, that I had been glued. I had stepped into myself, where I was shorn of the past and oblivious of the future. But then I exited. Shot back awake but gently, always gently. To go there, I had to be by myself. That would usually induce it. It wasn’t a question of will, either. It would just happen, if the situation were right. The odd thing, the longer I was outside my inside, the lonelier I was. So I went off when I could. Or else it was my nature. I don’t know. There was always that moment vs. any moment. Until I my brother’s loud and pestering nature would come barging in.

Instead, it was Mother, opening the door and closing it, her keys clinking the dish, her step squeaking on the hallway floor on the way to my room. My name came as a question. I knew what she wanted; she was always awake to those things. Cold air in the house meant our heating bill would soar, and that was money we didn’t have. Money, my father said, we were saving for a vacation next year. To South Dakota. To see Mount Rushmore. Suddenly, that trip and going there with his driving us and stopping at all the stops was upon me. To see the place where Custer was surrounded by the Sioux and he fought in a circle of guns and wagons and teams of frightened, rearing horses and one man escaped to get help but nobody came to help, which—the minutes-like-hours waiting on the Calvary, waiting to die—riddled them with hope and terror, knowing they’d die but not knowing when, both thoughts firing back and forth like hatchets flying end over end until Custer and his brave soldiers were moments away from being arrowed through the heart, scalped and whooped over, but No, I shouted, No, creating the opposite end to the battle on the floor with my plastic cowboys and Indians, a spare squadron of Calvary coming in at the last minute, bringing in the reinforcements from the rear, and sending the Indians running, surrounding and liberating Custer and his men. My mother was clanging in the kitchen. The faucet was running water into a pot, and I shut the window. I came out of my room and waited for my father. I looked out the big plate-glass window and imagined him driving up. And then I realized that I had spent the whole day at school and the whole afternoon by myself in my room thinking nothing about Grandpa Wallin.

III.

The phone rang at an hour in the evening when it had never rung. Mother exclaimed, “Oh, God,” and she handed the black earpiece to Dad. The next day, he told Grandma that Grandpa had died. He said she wept again as she had when she learned of the cancer. She wept quite a while until, exhausted, she slept. Under the stress, her broken foot and leg were still not healed, which meant she couldn’t attend his funeral in Rockford. There, at home, the heavy maple breadboards, the parakeet she cooed over and trained to say Hello Polly, the taste of butter on cardamon rolls fresh from the oven, I thought, would have made her whole. Mother went, Dad stayed home and watched us.

Soon, a month after he had died, I accompanied my parents to visit Grandma at the hospital. My brothers didn’t come, not in my memory. In the room, a bright winter sun had arrived, and Grandma looked less forlorn. Mother sat in a chair; I stood at the foot of the bed and listened.

It was as though they were picking up a conversation they had got only partway through.

“Grandpa never said a thing to you about the pain in his stomach?” my father asked.

“He never said anything,” Grandma said. “But I knew.”

“How did you know?”

“You don’t marry and live with a man for 45 years and not know a thing or two.” She managed a weak smile in my direction. “He wasn’t a very good actor, John.”

Dad wanted to know whether he was hiding something.

“What else would you call it?”

“But none of us knew that,” my father said. “If he was hiding it, then—that means—that it just doesn’t sound like him.”

“He didn’t want me to know,” she said.

Mother moved forward in her chair. “Oh, Mom, we mustn’t think he was keeping this from you on purpose.”

“What else can I think, Dorothy?”

“Mom,” my mother said, with her squeeze of disapproval.

“Grandpa didn’t know there was a tumor,” my father said. He said it with authority, almost as though it would stifle Grandma. It was my father’s most serious voice, the one that said there’s no argument. When you speak, he would tell me, speak up and tell the truth. “Grandpa felt some pain and, like an old goat, he just accepted it. Indigestion.”

I sensed the three of them had already snagged this burr before.

My father had been holding and stroking Grandma’s pock-marked hand. She drew it back now. As she paused, I could see that she was insisting on being heard. The crash and Grandpa’s death had changed her, knocked something loose. She wasn’t the forlorn and bedraggled woman we saw a few days after the wreck nor was she the giggling and kitchen-spry woman I used to treasure. I thought about who held the floor at the dinner table or from the wheel of the car. Never her. Always the grown men. Now she was leading.

She spoke for a while. She said she was relieved to know that Grandpa’s death had been hastened by the accident. If he was going to die, then, at least, lying in the hospital bed on morphine made it easier for him. He didn’t have to fight to keep the tumor hidden anymore. But she also said, “I have been lying here for a month, and all I can think about is how this man”—she was shaking her head no—“was stubborn and angry about I never knew what. You knew him, Dorothy. He had his opinions, which, Lord, I heard all the time. It was those opinions that got him so worked up. Or it was something else. Maybe he got tired that I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I had heard everything, and so had he. He got so that he didn’t talk to me. I don’t think he said much of anything the last year. Nothing but leave me alone, don’t fuss woman. Of course, I worried. I tried to get him to tell me what was wrong. What in the world is eating at you, Clarence, I would say. And he’d get huffy. How many times can you say that to somebody before they start resenting you. It was all I could do to stay out of his way. Whatever it was that was bothering him—maybe it was something I had done to him, for goodness sakes, I don’t know—whatever it was, it wasn’t indigestion.”

“Oh, Mom, I had no idea,” my father said.

“No one had any idea.” She paused. “Least of all me.” This was a new woman before me—buoyant, driven by an authority, a righteousness almost, that I had never heard. “And another thing. John, do you know what the doctor told me, just the other day? He said that on the day of the accident, when he did the surgery, opened up his stomach and found the cancer, he said it was so far advanced that he couldn’t do anything. He just sewed him back up. Now,” and she pulled herself up a bit in the bed, “I ask you, What kind of man let’s cancer take over his insides and won’t say a word about it to anybody?”

Now Grandma began crying. “To anybody. Even his wife.” My father was back patting her hand.

“I think he did this to get back at me,” she said.

“He what?” my father asked.

“For trying to understand him. The more I tried, the more he didn’t want anything to do with me.” By now my grandmother was expressing a whole life and personality that seemed to have landed in her like an alien. “It’s funny, John. But I feel much closer to him now that he’s gone. Closer than I ever have. What I know now”—she was crying again, softly—“I think might have saved him.”

We waited as though a curtain would come down. Until, at last, she said, “I’m not going to drive myself crazy about this. I am going to bear up. I’m not letting it drive me crazy.”

“It’s not crazy to miss him,” my father said. “We all miss him. We’ll all miss him. It won’t be easy.”

“But this is not the same, John. I know the difference between missing him and thinking that he did this”—her eyes flared—“on purpose.”

Just then a nurse arrived, wheeling in Grandma’s lunch. Once the gray lady lifted the steel top with the hole in the center, Grandma lighted up at what she saw. Mother said, “Oh, Mom, you’ve got your appetite back.” Indeed. She cut a chunk of steak and chewed it lustily, then knifed the corn off the cob into a bowl, heaped on the butter and salt, chewed like a factory worker for several minutes, not saying a word.

I see. Death is the first fact, followed by and aspiring to its uncountable consequences. Chief among them was that it didn’t matter that my parents believed Grandpa was not vindictive and Grandma believed he was. Dying without explanation wrongs the people who love you. You leave us questions, you leave us haunted, you insure the past will not end. With such one-sided walls the edifice gets built. Grandpa was a few weeks dead, eulogized and in the ground, but he wasn’t gone. He was there, in my grandmother’s anger at him, in the room, his inexplicableness settling in her and, I thought, becoming her no matter how much she might resist.

Riding home and blocking out my parents’ talk in the front seat, I felt the world grow flat and wide and distant. I was invigorated that Grandma had spoken up. But I was stunned, also, that it was connected to Grandpa’s dying. I see now that she had been capable of saying what she felt all along but never dared say it. The man he had become was not the man she had married. He had become the battlement she used to tip-toe around, whose meals and comfort she thought about incessantly. I remember her saying once that every morning of her life she had seen to the needs of others before she saw to her own. I remember, too, the trace of spite in that elegant sentence. None of us had known Grandma without Grandpa. The pair were knotted together, straining at the cinch. His death wasn’t going to loosen that—not by a long shot. Grandma had not lost him at all, for she couldn’t be without him. I imagine she wanted to be free, but he wasn’t shaking loose. Death took him, and yet he hadn’t budged. He was there, even now, five miles and twenty minutes away, in the hospital food—morsels of his soul—that Grandma was savoring. I awoke when our street came into view. There was the familiar row of sloping yards each with a baby tree in its middle tied to a tomato stake. My father gassed Mother’s Ford wagon up our newly black-topped driveway, a black as dark as coal, and we got out and headed for the stoop and the locked door. My father entered the key in the slot, and we followed him in.

IV.

One place he went (and I still follow) were the years after Grandpa’s death. During the next dozen years, I wanted to ask my father whether he felt Grandpa Wallin had forced his way into Grandma’s body that day, that this is what the dead do when they die: bully themselves into the living. I wanted to know what he remembered that day in Grandma’s hospital room—to see whether his recollection resembled mine. I wanted to tell my father, the atheist, that I knew Grandpa wasn’t a ghost from some Bible-like afterlife. I knew, rather, that he was an enigma, merging with my grandmother’s self, which she would try to resist but fail. I wanted my father to know that I knew this—that there’s no other explanation for Grandma’s change—and discover whether he would have agreed with me. How good it would feel to know, even today, even if it were fleeting.

But, by the time I was 15, my father and I had grown distant. I was long-haired and flippant and self-obsessed; Vietnam was breathing down my neck. When Lyndon Johnson got in the White House, you couldn’t tell me what I didn’t know. My father had his own Vietnams: his three years in the Pacific during the war, which he never voiced, and the constant battles with my older brother Steve. Battle fatigue and Steve had worn him out. He reeked of dissatisfaction. He hated his job. He brooded. Worst was his indifference. Nobody asked why. Why was for shrinks, not avoidance-savvy families. The 18 holes he played on Saturdays or the poker games on Friday nights or the weekly sales trips to Duluth and Davenport didn’t renew him. He gained weight, the unlosable kind, he kept smoking, and eventually, after a bowl of ice milk for dessert every night, and lounging in front of the TV (I was upstairs, in my room, the door shut, reading, playing music, all those years), he had his first heart attack. After I’d left for college, he was at a sales convention in Denver when he suffered shortness of breath and drove himself to a hospital. There, he got in bed and boom! his body bucked, he went under, and they revived him.

His end, though, is still a ways off. A couple years before that first attack, we are staying at Grandma Wallin’s home for a summer holiday. One afternoon, she’s in her high wingback blue chair, my father sitting across from her, and she’s telling him, with that now recognizably caustic tone, her Grandpa-laced voice, that she feels terrible having had, this past spring, the one breast amputated because of the cancer they found (which we heard about in a panicky phone call an hour after it was diagnosed), and now the other breast is threatened and may have to be removed as well: “Oh, John, I just don’t think I can go through with it: How much cutting do they think an old woman like me can stand?”

“If anyone can stand it, you can, Mom,” he says, patting her hand.

I’ve just passed by, heard their conversation. Mother calls, “Tommy,”—only my family calls me that, though I’m in high school—“will you ride your bike over to Hanson’s,” the Swedish bakery where the cardamon rolls are made, “and pick up a dozen rolls for tomorrow’s breakfast?” Mother is the caretaker now. Tomorrow is Sunday morning and we aren’t going anywhere, not with Grandma Wallin, so blue, so tired, so—she calls it achy.

My father gives me a five-dollar bill, and I hustle to the garage where my summer bicycle is kept. Cobwebbed, dusty, it leans in the corner of the garage, which smells of old oil, dripped onto flat pans and glistening, of heat ensnared. The big Plymouth is gone, sold. Our car, a newer Ford station wagon, is parked on the street. The garage is a museum to Grandpa’s orderliness, his vestige, preserved and forgotten out here. Why would we remember him? Because Grandma does. Up and down one wall, between the studs, his old license plates are stacked. Color-by-color (most tarnished but still the oranges and reds and browns and Navy blues) and decade-by-decade (1919 to 1928, 1929 to 1938, 1939 to 1948, 1949 to 1957). The light inside feels trapped as though it were unable to get back out through the two dirty windows.

I check the tires (still hard) and leave by the side door. At Hanson’s, the odor of the rolls is overwhelming. It lingers in the slanted rows behind the glass, wafts in from the back room. (Lots of other families are buying rolls for Sunday breakfast in this Swede-plump town.) A bearish woman hands me the white bag, and I put it in the bike’s wire basket. The rolls have grease-stained the paper already. I need not go home at once, so I ride back the long way. By the corner where the woman on the corner is standing. Where she’s still standing. Or so Grandma has said recently, her wonder fled, “If you can believe it.”

I stop across the street from the woman’s home but she’s not outside. It doesn’t matter anymore, though, because her memory has taken root. The man she recalls was burned up by gasoline; the man Grandma recalls was burned up by cancer. Outer and inner wrecks. When we drove by the woman on the corner, maybe my grandmother did know the woman’s vigil would be her own—she would hold onto a husband who’d hover and descend, caw and peck and pull at the moist parts, eat her alive because he was dead, then hop away, take wing, circle back. This is the human end, that what’s over is never over. It’s not death I’m afraid of. It’s the lingering, that moment merging into any moment, into all moments, into what will happen before it blends into what does happen—

Time becomes magisterial. Such words say the ideas, instead of just rolling through me like a marble in a tub. My voice—this voice—begins. The ringing commentary mixed with the categorizing reassessments of everything I see and feel and take in, and the story that embodies it, begin. I’m already disregarding the scene before me. I’m 15, obsessed with analyzing who I am and where I’m going (Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been? is the title of a book on my parents’ shelf)—I tired quickly of playing baseball, I want more time to myself, I plan to read several of the harder books I’ve listed in a notebook, harder than what I’ve read before, I want my grandmother to be how she was, I want her to laugh and be the butt of a joke and to stop complaining about how bad she feels and remember that what was lost was lost for both of us—that she used to be the grandmother I loved, but I don’t love this grandmother anymore, not like I did, which, if she can feel it, only makes her sad and me uncaring. I don’t notice what’s in front of me because now I have to keep up with what’s expanding inside me, the years of already, how each of us have only so much capacity in our tanks when suddenly I hear a directorial cue—start pedaling—the very moment I’m living has been memorialized. What I cannot get free from in my family is now me, its strata folded like rock: how my grandfather’s correctness lives on in his license plates; how grandmother is the sweet, sugary smell of the cardamon rolls and a querulous old woman; how my father and I wanted to speak with each other but couldn’t; how the cars are sleek and turbo-charged and moving faster than ever up and down the beveled, smoothed streets; how—

Where you are going is where you have been.

It won’t be any other way.

Don’t be afraid of death.

But it’s not death I’m afraid of.

Now I’m pedaling—I have to come back to the world, to love others and to know I will lose them, to know they’ll lodge inside me the moment they’re gone; I hear my father laboring to breath; five smoke-free years after the first, a second heart attack arrives in a hotel room in St. Louis; there, he chokes on a chicken bone and flails on the bed, unable to breathe; his heart stops; my mother screams into the hallway for an ambulance; she screams at his purpling; she falls to the floor when the defibrillator doesn’t work; she is crying, telling me all this on the phone, that he’s dead and he’s only 61; on the plane back, I imagine him gasping for the air that has always obliged him but won’t anymore; his allotment’s done; I imagine the stupidity of a funeral and the piety that sucks off such sudden ends, entrapping the family of the dissenter; I am 25, and I insist faith and God and the superstitions are not mentioned during the service, against my mother’s wishes; that wouldn’t honor him, I argue; it was important to him that he spite holiness, decry hypocrisy; none of us are free of the world but at least he was free of God; his godlessness, I want to tell my mother but can’t and never do, bullies itself into me, claims its stake; thanks to my grandmother, thanks to my father, thanks to the woman on the corner, I have proof (as you do) that where the dead go is not to heaven or hell or the four winds or the light but into us, the living urn—I’m pedaling and the road’s incline means that if want to ride the dip, I pedal harder, push toward it decisively, knowing the dip will glide me all the way to the garage, and, if I time it right, all the way through a last cooling breeze and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll roll in where I began without touching the handle bars.