“Nurse Eliot,” he said, “I’ll remember your kindness but I hope it will be a long time before I see you again.”
“I hope so too,” she said. She looked at my family gathered in the room, standing awkwardly about. “Buckley, your mother’s and sister’s hands are full. It’s up to you.”
“Steer her easy, Buck,” my father said.
I watched the four of them begin to trail down the hall to the elevator, Buckley and my father first while Lindsey and my mother followed behind, their arms full of dripping daffodils.
In the elevator going down, Lindsey stared into the throats of the bright yellow flowers. She remembered that Samuel and Hal had found yellow daffodils lying in the cornfield on the afternoon of the first memorial. They had never known who placed them there. My sister looked at the flowers and then my mother. She could feel my brother’s body touching hers, and our father, sitting in the shiny hospital chair, looking tired but happy to be going home. When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them together, alone.
While Ruana’s hands grew wet and swollen paring apple after apple, she began to say the word in her mind, the one she had avoided for years: divorce. It had been something about the crumpled, clinging postures of her son and Ruth that finally freed her. She could not remember the last time she had gone to bed at the same time as her husband. He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.
She heard the sound of water running in the bathroom above her and waited what she thought was a considerate interval before calling up to them. My mother had called that morning to thank her for having talked to her when she called from California, and Ruana had decided to drop off a pie.
After handing a mug of coffee each to Ruth and Ray, Ruana announced that it was already late and she wanted Ray to accompany her to the Salmons’, where she intended to run quietly to the door and place a pie on their doorstep.
“Whoa, pony,” Ruth managed.
Ruana stared at her.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ray said. “We had a pretty intense day yesterday.” But he wondered, might his mother ever believe him?
Ruana turned toward the counter and brought one of two pies she had baked to the table, where the scent of it rose in a steamy mist from the holes cut into the crust. “Breakfast?” she said.
“You’re a goddess!” said Ruth.
Ruana smiled.
“Eat your fill and then get dressed and both of you can come with me.”
Ruth looked at Ray while she said, “Actually, I have somewhere to go, but I’ll drop by later.”
Hal brought the drum set over for my brother. Hal and my grandmother had agreed. Though it was still weeks before Buckley turned thirteen, he needed them. Samuel had let Lindsey and Buckley meet my parents at the hospital without him. It would be a double homecoming for them. My mother had stayed with my father for forty-eight hours straight, during which the world had changed for them and for others and would, I saw now, change again and again and again. There was no way to stop it.
“I know we shouldn’t start too early,” Grandma Lynn said, “but what’s your poison, boys?”
“I thought we were set up for champagne,” Samuel said.
“We are later,” she said. “I’m offering an aperitif.”
“I think I’m passing,” Samuel said. “I’ll have something when Lindsey does.”
“Hal?”
“I’m teaching Buck the drums.”
Grandma Lynn held her tongue about the questionable sobriety of known jazz greats. “Well, how about three scintillating tumblers of water?”
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.
