I opened up my flip phone and scrolled to Bev’s number. I pressed the call button. Bev answered a couple of rings later.
“I’ve misplaced my grandmother.”
“She’s fine, she’s here with me.”
“Where’s here?”
“We’re at Barbara’s.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “She heard from the Army. They found her grandson’s body.”
“Oh.” I said, an important contribution to the conversation.
“Emma is looking tired. Could you come and get her?”
“Um, yeah, I guess.”
Why couldn’t Bev bring her home?I wondered as I hung up. She’d brought her there. Grudgingly, I went out to the Escalade and drove down the driveway. I sat there counting cars as they went by. Three, four, six. Annoyingly, traffic had picked up around Memorial Day.
Tourists. Fudgies.
I know it’s ridiculous to complain about traffic in Masons Bay. I grew up in Los Angeles, after all. Except, I did complain. It was taking forever to get out of my grandmother’s driveway.In the summer, it seemed like there was a traffic problem in Wyandot County and probably for the same reason there was a traffic problem in L.A. There were more cars than the roads could—
Ah, a break. Between a PT Cruiser and a Wagoneer pulling an Airstream, I zoomed out onto M22 and then had to immediately slow down. The PT Cruiser was going ten miles an hour below the speed limit.
Masons Bay was ten minutes away in the summer and five in the winter. Yes, I know, I was annoyed about a ten-minute drive, but it wasdoublewhat it should be.
Barbara lived on Saint Pete, which ran parallel to Main Street in Masons Bay Village. There were already half a dozen cars sitting in front of her yellow house. Made of clapboard, the house was built on a slight rise so that the front porch was quite a bit above the street. After I parked the Escalade, I walked down the sidewalk and then climbed the steep stairs up to the porch.
I knocked on the door. Sue Langtree opened it, and said, “There you are. Come on in.” With that, she gave me a gigantic smile that made me want to compliment her dentist.
I stepped into the front room of the house, a formal living room with antiques and expensive furniture. Barbara sat on the sofa with my grandmother next to her holding her hand. Nana Cole looked more alert and healthier than she had in months. I wondered if tragedy was her element.
Sue crossed the room and sat down on Barbara’s other side. On a loveseat, which matched the sofa, sat Jan and Dorothy. In other chairs there was Dolores from church and a few others I didn’t know. I didn’t see Bev anywhere.
Dolores got up and whispered to me that Cheryl Ann was in the kitchen. “The young people are making snacks.”
I resisted the temptation to say, “Oh goodie.”
Walking across the living room, I went through a door that led to a formal dining room, then another into the kitchen. There, I found Cheryl Ann wearing a giant MSU sweatshirt, Sheila from church, two women in their mid-thirties who I guess qualified as ‘young people,’ and Bev.
I glared at Bev.
“You said she looked tired. She doesn’t look tired.”
“Second wind,” she said, shrugging. “We’re making sandwiches and cookies. And iced tea. Jump in.”
‘Jump in’ turned out to be my doing chores: washing dishes, taking out the garbage, running to Benson’s Country Market for a couple pounds of luncheon meat, a few loaves of sourdough and those wonderful lemon cookies they sell. People kept arriving and I began to wonder if the death of Barbara’s grandson had been nationally televised.
During the course of all this, I picked up a few details. Barbara’s grandson had been gunned down while he and his unit protected an oil field in northern Iraq. Or maybe it was southern Iraq. That part was sketchy. Apparently, the fighting had been intense enough that Josh—his name was Josh—that his body was left there for several days until a mission could be organized to go back and retrieve it.
I also picked up on the fact that Josh’s mother was in Wisconsin and his father in Chicago. They’d apparently divorced many years ago, leaving Josh to spend summers with his grandmother. It wasn’t until I’d returned from Benson’s Country Store—only to find another sink full of dishes—that anyone mentioned the fact that Josh was only nineteen.
That kind of hit me. He was about five years younger than I was. How did he end up on the other side of the world protecting someone else’s oil well? Why did he think that was a good idea? Why did anyone think that was a good idea?
And then I got the feeling I was missing something, something important. I wandered back out to the living room and there, on the wall over the electric organ, were a bunch of framed photographs of Josh growing up. There were about ten of them: Josh with his grandparents, Josh alone, Josh during his summer visits. One of the photos brought me to a stop. It was me at twelve with Josh, who would have been about seven. I had no memory of the photo being taken, and very few memories of Josh at seven.
I’d been sent to spend a summer with my grandparents—believe me, I’ve done everything I can to block that from my memory. It was probably around the time my mother got together with Frank—and since they were newlyweds they didn’t want me around much. Well, even after they were newlyweds they didn’t want me around much.
Not that I can blame them. I didn’t like Frank much and had made it abundantly clear. Eventually, I got better at hiding it, if only so I could stay in Los Angeles. Anyway, I was miserable that summer. Homesick and angry. And then, to make matters worse, my grandmother and Barbara would drop me and Josh off at the park—a tiny patch of green grass with a basketball court—and expect us to entertain ourselves. Basically, I took that to mean I was supposed to be this kid’s babysitter.
