Between throws

A story of discovery and reconnection

Chapter 1

When the coffin was lowered into the ground, something else fell in with it. Was it the guilt? The pangs of relief that she was finally gone? There never were very many women in my family. Now there was one less.

A light snow fell. A child might be forgiven for thinking this was all part of a video game scene where someone gets buried in earth made of chocolate and the snow is actually powdered sugar. Except I was no child anymore. “I’m 15 years old. I’m supposed to be able to handle this. I should be able to handle this.”

My aunt came up and put her arm around me. “She loved you, you know that, right?”

It felt like a strange thing to say. “Who says that?” I wondered. “Why would you say that? Was there confusion? Was there evidence she didn’t love her only son? Did she or they know something I didn’t?”

Everything felt heavy. The preacher doled out a few words in the crisp air. A handful of people sat at the six or seven chairs lining the grave. Everyone else stood packed tightly under the meager tent. The undertakers had covered the mound of dirt they would use to cover my mother with a fluorescent green canvas. That might have worked had it not been the middle of January. The canvas seemed comical against the stark Midwestern brown. Brown twigs, brown mud, brown branches, brown leaves, brown cars. Heck even the snow turned brown after being touched. That and it was far too small, like covering a mattress with a pillowcase. There were brown bath rugs at Bed Bath and Beyond that probably could have done a better job.

The preacher finished. I think. “Let us say a prayer…” Okay, so he wasn’t finished.

What comes next? What should I be prepared for? Suddenly, everyone got up. Several people in the back turned toward their cars. Everyone hovering around me took their place in what was a clear line to shake my hand or give me a hug. I hated hugs. I don’t like being touched. But there they were, so I took my place like a good little boy. It’s what my mom would have wanted.

After everyone finished filing through, I smelled like dozens of different perfumes and colognes. “Who wears a smell? And to a funeral? Is there someone you’re trying to impress? God, maybe?” I wondered. “Does God really care what you smell like? Doesn’t he sorta know that already?”

It was just my grandmother and me now. We stood there as two men leaned on shovels a few graves over. It felt like the only thing separating them from their lunch break was this hole and the two of us, standing here, unsure what to do. Of course, we knew what to do. You leave. You turn around and walk back to your car and drive home, and then who knows what happens. “Just another task in the to-do list,” I told myself.

My grandmother burst out in tears. It was the first time I’d ever seen her not just cry, but sob. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did whatever it was people did to me and put my arm around her. “Should I tell her that she loved you?” I wondered. That seemed so weird. As if someone needed to tell a grieving mother anything about how her relationship with her daughter was. Let alone from a 15-year-old grandson.

The snow kept sputtering to the ground. A few of the older people had a hard time walking back to their cars down the little hill. “Am I going to have to carry my grandmother back?” I wondered.

She placed her hand on the coffin and bowed her head. I never knew my grandmother was an overtly religious person, but here she was praying. I think. You learn so much about a person when faced with death. Are they afraid? Do they cry? Are they contemplative? My uncles stood sternly, wiping away rogue tears with a handkerchief. My cousins stood sternly, likely unaware of what all was happening. They probably didn’t even know my mother. There were some people I didn’t recognize crying more than I thought possible for people I wasn’t sure my mom would even know if they fell in the grave with her. It would take years for me to recognize they were crying over *me* as much as anything else.

Lifting her hand off the coffin my grandmother stepped back and turned. “Put your hand on the coffin, Jason.” This was the second time she told me to touch something. A few hours earlier at the funeral home she said the same thing. “Touch her, Jason.” I wasn’t sure why, but did as I was told as we stood staring at my mom’s body. She looked oddly flat, very pale. The muscles in her face seemed compressed, as if she had her face outside a car window at low speed. All I could think was how much she’d hate that we were all just staring at her. Part of me felt like we should have closed the coffin. She looked almost foreign to me, too. I hadn’t seen her with her glasses on in over a year, no thanks to the brain tumor that took her vision. Her hair was neatly cut for the first time in nearly two years. She wore her favorite dark navy Winnie the Pooh sweater and blue jeans. They looked baggy on her given the weight loss.

I reached out for her hands, both neatly clasped together over her ribs. I don’t know what my grandmother was expecting from this. It felt like a coarse, dried-out sponge. Almost as if the skin would flake if you rubbed it too hard. There was no warmth, but it didn’t feel cold. Just like touching the edge of a pie crust that had been left on the counter for a few days.

“Was this long enough?” I wondered. I took my hand back. I didn’t really want to touch my mom. Weirdly, as it was happening, I realized I was surely living a core memory that would stick with me, whether I wanted it to or not, for the rest of my life. I’d never forget that dried pie crust feeling. I’d never forget the sight of my grandmother crying. And I’d never forget the sight of that stupid bright lime green canvas covering a pile of dirt that was spilling out in all directions.

As we turned to walk back to the cars I grabbed my grandmother’s hand to help her down the hill.

Chapter 2

It took twenty years but I finally realized my grandmother told me to touch my mom at the funeral home to make it tangible and real. Supposedly, it would help bring closure or finality, as if I needed that. There was no shortage of grief counselors and pamphlets for camps, groups, churches, programs, and whatever the hell “resources and services” were thrown at me from all directions.

It’s hilariously unclear what you’re supposed to do after a funeral. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I dropped my grandmother off at her home, where she lived alone, and helped her unload all manner of flowers and casseroles. Then I illegally drove myself back to the house I had grown up in. The law said I could drive to school or work and back on my learner’s permit. But I don’t think the law would mind driving back and forth to a funeral. Then I unloaded all manner of flowers and casseroles. There were so many they covered every inch of table space, the top of the TV, the shelves, the kitchen table, the nightstands, the dressers, and even the back of the toilet. After that space ran out, I just sat them in the living room floor. And there I sat in an E-Z chair. My mom’s hospital bed was still in the corner. Hospice would be by to pick that up sometime. All her morphine and pain pills sat in a row on a small table. The rugs were still turned up so Benny down at the funeral home could wheel her out the hearse.

With nothing else to do that Saturday afternoon, I turned on the TV. For two years mom struggled through three brain surgeries, two rounds of radiation, the loss of her mobility, constant headaches, the loss of her vision, deafness in her left ear, and constant seizures and strokes. Now it was over and I felt both guilty and relieved by that. Now, ABC was airing the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. I ordered a Papa John’s pizza and watched Pierce Brosnan fight an evil news empire trying to destroy the world through misinformation. Now, twenty years later, it’s clear 007 missed a few enemies. The things you notice when you’re 35 hit differently than at 15.

Numbers also hit differently. I was 15 when mom died. She was 41. My grandmother was 61. Now I’m almost my mom’s age when she died, my grandmother is 81. It’s as if the whole timeline just fast-forwarded through a wormhole.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” I said, knocking on my grandma’s door. The top of her puffy hair poked through the door window that was too tall for her. Even if she stood on her tiptoes her 5’5” frame still couldn’t quite see out. Yet every time someone knocked, she instinctively tried to see who was there first.

“Ohhh look at them flowers,” she said as I handed over the poinsettia. They always were her favorite. “Just set them there on the table.”

“You know, I might have gone a little too big this year,” I said, realizing they consumed nearly all of the small black kitchen table. She just laughed. “Sit down. Let me get you a cup of coffee.”

We sat down at the round table and scooted the poinsettias off to the side. At 81 her mind was sharp, capable of recalling any date or time or calculating the day of the week of any birthday in the family. Ask her when some obscure cousin was born and she’d stare off for a second and say something like, “Well, so-and-so was born on July 31, and that was a Tuesday that year, so he must have been born on a Monday since it was April 14.”

“How are things at work?” She asked. She always started with work.

“Good enough, I guess. Several new projects rolling out soon.” I never bothered her with the technical bits. My work in software development probably didn’t make much sense to a woman who had never owned or touched a computer. The most advanced thing in her house was probably the microwave with it’s “baked potato button.” The phone was still a rotary dial, even in 2018.

“Your mom would be proud of you,” she said, sipping on her coffee.

“Yeah,” I said tepidly. Truth be told I didn’t know what mom would think. The world had changed so much. Mom died before flip phones. She’d never used a computer. She didn’t even experience cable TV. The most advanced thing in the house at the time was a cordless phone that could reach clear across the house. The answering machine used literal cassette tapes. Now here I was writing software that powered little games and apps on people’s pocket computers. There was so much my mom didn’t know, wouldn’t know, and couldn’t have known.

We sat quietly in her kitchen. It was sparse, and looked largely like it did when it was built in the 1960s. She showed me the bill for the house. The whole thing — all three bedrooms, living room, bathroom, kitchen, and carport cost all of $8,000 in 1961. In 2018 prices that’d be like building a whole house for $67,000.

“Do you want to get started?” I asked rhetorically, setting my coffee down and walking over to the cupboard where she kept some games. Most of them had boxes that looked like they were from the 70s or maybe early 80s. There was a deck of Uno cards, a deck of playing cards, an old Scrabble set that somehow still had all the pieces, a Checker board, Chess with little plastic pieces that all looked the same, Candyland which we never played, and Bunco. “Bunco?” I asked, looking back.

“Yeah,” she said, reaching for a napkin to set under her mug. The table was surely older than me and it looked new. I’d never known her to have any other table, so I guess you can’t expect things to look nice if you don’t take care of them.

These weekly game sessions had become something of a habit-bordering-on-tradition since mom died. After ABC ran out of James Bond films to air on Saturday nights there wasn’t much left to do.

Looking at the games she had, I was familiar with Uno, Checkers, Chess, and Scrabble. She’d taught me Rummy, Blackjack, Euchre, and War. “It’s been a while since we’ve played Bunco. You’re going to have to remind me of some of the rules.” No part of me doubted she remembered all of them, and probably the score of everyone she’d ever played with.

Like Euchre and Rummy, we’d bent or maybe she invented some of the rules to make it playable for two people. “Not much to it,” she said, reaching for a pen and a score card that had been re-used one too many times as I dumped out the box on the table. “Just roll these three dice and try to match the round number.”

She started rolling with a 1 • 2 •4. “You get three rolls to roll three ones in this first round,” she said. I wasn’t sure if that was a real rule or if she just made it up.

“How’s Pauline?” I asked, watching her roll. “Oh, you know her. She complains about everything. The other day she said she hit her hand on a rail. Then it was burnt toast that morning that set the smoke alarm off. She lives over in those senior houses, you know, so all the fire department came and everything,” she said, laughing in her subdued chuckle. “I just imagine the look on her face holding that burnt toast and all them great big fire trucks coming flying in there to rescue her.”

It was a pretty funny visual. Pauline was a friend of hers that I think was also a distant cousin. In a small town, everyone’s family tree bumps into everyone else’s eventually.

Reaching for the dice I rolled a 4 • 4 • 3. “Did she get any of the firemen’s numbers?” I asked, trying to add to her humor.

“Noooo, I don’t think so. But she did hear from all her neighbors who were mighty surprised by the commotion.”

I rolled again, this time a 4 • 2 • 5. “Wasn’t she seeing someone?” I asked.

“Oh, some guy she goes down to the Moose Lodge with from time to time. He’s not worth much. About like your father.”

“Does she know that?” I asked, rolling my final 1 • 2 • 4.

“I don’t guess so,” she said, reaching for the dice. “Like your mother, she must have seen something. Maybe he was a good kisser.”

The words hung in the air for a moment. I’d never thought about Pauline or my mother as a sexual being before. Sure, there was the academic acknowledgement I exist and therefore she must have had sex somewhere around the fall of 1986, but this brought up all sorts of questions.

She rolled a 5 • 2 • 6.

“Do you know how mom and dad met?” I asked, staring into my mostly-empty cup of coffee. I don’t know why I wanted to know.

“Oh yeah. He rode around town on that motor-sickle of his and someone set them up on a blind date. He worked down at the factory. Didn’t seem very bright to me and awfully bull-headed. He treated her well enough, I guess. Never hit her or anything,” she said with a slight pause at the end. “He was gay, you know.”

The room seemed to spin so fast the poinsettia was surely going to fly off the table from sheer centrifugal force.

She rolled a 2 • 2 • 2. “Bunco,” she said tepidly.

Chapter 3

I don’t think I ever knew my father. Not well, anyway. He was tepidly aloof, seemingly never keeping anything from you because there wasn’t anything to hold close. For all his effort working a hard factory job, he just didn’t seem a very interesting man. How could you keep things from people if there wasn’t anything worth keeping?

No one ever described him as mean, or hateful, or otherwise harmful. But by the time I was in 6th grade I also never heard much about him anymore.

Rotating through a small bank of memories about him I couldn’t understand why my grandma was telling me he was gay. “Why do you say that? How do you know? He married mom, didn’t he? They had me, didn’t they?”

“Your mother came home one day to a message on the answering machine. Some man was asking for your daddy. She didn’t know who it was so she called back and he picked up.”

“You mean dad picked up the phone?”

“Yeah,” she said, writing down the date on her Bunco card. She always dated every scorecard and kept them, whether it was Yahtzee, dominoes, or, now, Bunco.

“As if he was there? Who was the guy? Where was he?” I had dispensed with trying to ask questions as part of some disinterested conversation. I wanted answers.

“I don’t know who he was. I was there with her in the room when she called back. We thought he was supposed to be at work but it was in the middle of the day.”

“How does she know he wasn’t?” I felt like I knew the answer to this question. This was a time before cell phones. Dad didn’t have a personal line. He wouldn’t have answered any phone at the factory. He worked out on the loading docks, around trucks. It would have been noisy, or at least like a call from someone standing in a concrete and metal box.

Grandma got up from her chair and walked over to the coffee maker. “She said she heard music. They didn’t talk very long. She asked what he was doing, where he was, and when he was coming home.” Fidgeting with the Mr. Coffee filters she carried on, “She didn’t say much. I didn’t hear what he said, of course. I think he must have been lying about where he was and that’s what upset your mom. But I think she knew. She’d never mention it but everyone thought him and one of the other guys down at the factory were a little close.”

It all sounded like conjecture. But it also sounded impossible to think up any other explanation. Guys like my dad didn’t spend much time anywhere where he’d have a phone nearby and felt empowered to answer it.

I don’t remember when mom and dad divorced, but it must have been around when I was in the 4th grade. How much do kids remember from when they were 7 years old or any point before?

I started blankly out the kitchen door. It overlooked a carport in dire need of paint that probably hadn’t had anything done to it since it was built fifty years earlier. Stirring around, the coffee maker bubbled and hissed as water percolated through tubes that were surely twenty years old. Without turning around, Grandma asked, “Do you want any coffee?”

“No, I’ve had enough for today,” I said solemnly. She wasn’t dumb. I know she knew I’d have more questions. I was waiting for her to pipe up but she seemed to have moved on. “Did she ever say anything about him or that day?”

“Not much. I think it was a suspicion she harbored for a while but couldn’t quite deal with. Or maybe she didn’t know how to deal with it. Whatever it was, I left the house before he came back that afternoon. I don’t know what she told him. All she ever told me was, ‘This was all a mistake.’ And she didn’t want to talk about it much anymore,” she said.

Glancing at my watch, I realized the time. The dog had been home for hours and would need to go out. “I need to let Moose out,” I said. But I still had so many questions. Where was my dad now? Who knew more? Or anything?

The factory had long since closed. After decades of employing thousands of people manufacturing furniture, they whittled down to just a few hundred. Then a flood struck and wiped out most of the building. A fire started on the other side of the building. What didn’t burn washed away, and what didn’t wash away was burned. All the wrong elements were in all the wrong places that day. Surely someone would have reasoned the only thing that didn’t happen to the building was a freeze or a plague. Rather than rebuild, the owners decided to just cut their losses and give up.

“You be good now, you hear?” Grandma said, looking at me as I put my jacket on. It was the same thing she’d been telling me since I was a kid anytime I was about to walk out of a room.

“I will. Same time next week?”

“Well, I’ll have to check my planner but I should be able to,” she said with a soft sarcastic chuckle. She and I both knew full well that she didn’t have anything to do next week short of a hair appointment.

Chapter 4

“Not my day, is it?”

“No, but neither is it for me,” I said. Grandma and I had been rolling for what seemed like hours without as much as a mini Bunco. “What do suppose the statistical odds are that two people could roll three lousy dice this many times over half an hour and not land one Bunco?”

“Ohh, I don’t know,” she mused. “Today probably isn’t the day to go buy a lotto ticket.”

Our conversations over the last several weeks had mellowed into a comfortable back-and-forth interspersed with revealing nuggets. She’d worked at a canning factory right after high school until she married my grandfather. It seemed customary at the time. I knew she’d worked for a while. I didn’t know she quit because it angered my grandfather. The whole timeline felt repressed and off-limits.

We’d talk about my work, though I wasn’t sure she really understood exactly what it was I did for a living. We’d talk about cousins and siblings, their kids, and the changes with the neighborhood. She seemed bothered both by the construction of new homes in the area and the overall lack of progress in building anything else.

“Do you want any coffee?” She asked, getting up from the table.

I looked at my watch. It was 6:15 pm. “It’s a quarter past six! How do you sleep at night with that much coffee?”

“Oh, I don’t sleep much anyway,” she replied with a sense of resignation. Indeed, she’d always kept odd hours getting up and going to bed in spurts. She’d lie down at 7, wake up at 11 to watch TV, fall back asleep, wake up at 3 or 4 and start to clean the house, only to lie back down again around 6 or 7 am for an hour or two and then run through the day.

“Was your sleep always so disjointed?” I asked.

“More or less, I guess. It started when I was pregnant with your mother. She’d kick or roll around at night, waking me up, and I’d get up to walk around. Seemed to work to calm her back down.”

The familiar gurgle of the Mr. Coffee started to percolate behind her.

“Was it a rough pregnancy?”

“No, I don’t guess so. We didn’t have any complications or anything like that. When you’re pregnant, so long as you get ten fingers and ten toes it’s really all you want.”

“Did mom have any issues when she was pregnant with me?” I asked.

“She couldn’t keep anything down. Seemed everything made her sick except tomato juice. She drank so much tomato juice we thought it’d make your hair red. She was up early a lot, too. No surprise when you were born at 4:30 in the morning.”

Pulling the decanter from the hot plate she poured a cup of Maxwell House into her lone mug. “Your daddy wanted to name you ‘Keith’. Your mom didn’t like that idea much. We still have no idea where that name came from.”

“How come mom didn’t like it?”

“I don’t know. Just didn’t like the way it sounded I guess. She liked Jason more. It was popular at the time. Though they dropped it pretty early. Everyone thought you were going to be a girl.”

“Why?” I said, rattling the dice in my hands.

“Just the way she was carrying you. They didn’t do all the ultrasounds and stuff like they do now. It wasn’t until about two or three weeks before you were born they had an ultrasound and noticed you were a boy. That’s when they started thinking of new names,” she said, taking a sip of coffee.

The dice rattled across the table. “Do you suppose Keith was someone dad knew? Another family member? And what round are we on again?”

“Fifteen. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knew anyone by that name.” Picking up the dice, she rolled a Bunco.

Later that evening, I drove by the old house. It had sat there for years almost like a time capsule. After mom died, it wasn’t long before I simply walked out the door to go to school. The mortgage was paid off. Taxes were low. The house sustained itself off on its own well and septic. The only recurring bill of significance was the electricity. Nothing made sense about what to do with the house. The job of sifting through all the stuff and accumulated memories seemed a job worth doing some other day.

Now, sitting outside the house, I uncovered the spare key sitting behind a rock behind the garage and felt the existential dread of turning it in the knob. “Grandma hasn’t stepped foot in this house since the day after mom died,” I thought. Coming home that afternoon, I remember being the last person through the door. It seemed like the whole funeral showed up in the living room within minutes of her dying. Even the hospice nurse was there. They all turned and looked at me in near perfect sync, tears in their eyes.

Now, standing in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, everything was precisely the same and not nearly how I remembered it. “Was the kitchen floor always that pattern of linoleum? Was the carpet always this worn?” Walking through the house more questions arose. “Was the TV always that small? Was the bathroom always that blue?” It seemed familiar, yet foreign. Like I was walking through someone else’s house, even though it was technically owned by me.

The red brick house was long and rectangular, with a single main floor and its defining single hallway with rooms on all sides. In the back center was my old room. The back right, just next to it, was mom and dad’s room. They hadn’t both slept in there together since I was little.

Walking into mom’s room, the sheets were still tussled. The Styrofoam head held her wig on the dresser. She hated the scars the surgeries left. The mirror over the dresser was dusty. Looking at myself in that mirror seemed like a metaphor. Hazy, dusty, a little dark, and in need of attention.

I turned and opened the closet. I had riffled around to find mom’s favorite sweater and jeans for the funeral, but didn’t dare poke through the albums, myriad boxes, and other brickabrack lining the floor and walls.

Chapter 5

There’s something special about living somewhere where the wind physically hurts your face. Standing against the wintry force of nature as it blows over your skin is a reminder that nature could, if it wanted to, kill you. Given time, of course. Otherwise, you’re just standing in the cold.

Staring down at the snow-covered earth, Jason placed a small bouquet of red roses on his mother’s grave. “Seems I probably should have been adding flowers more regularly,” he thought quietly to himself. “Sorry I didn’t,” he murmured aloud, as if his mother could hear him.

After staring at the ground, wondering what he was supposed to be saying he realized the last time he’d visited the cemetery was five years ago. “We’ve learned a lot in the last five years, Mom.” He said aloud. “Grandma told me about Dad. I don’t know what that was like for you. Betrayal, I guess. I haven’t spoken to him. I don’t know what you knew. I assume you knew he wasn’t really in love with you. It draws into question what he thought about anyone. Did he love me?”

“I found a shoebox full of photos. It was mostly photos of me. I think you tore up all the photos of yourself before you died,” Jason continued aloud, speaking to his mother. Or, at least, to himself in the third person. “That day I came home and saw you sitting on the floor. I think you were tearing up the photos of yourself. As if you were trying to erase yourself.”

Wind howling over Jason’s ears muffled his own thoughts for a moment. “How come you did that? Did you not like how you looked in the photos? You left the ones of grandma and me. The ones with grandpa. She told me about him, too. Was he a mean person? Did he drink? Did he use to hit her? Is that why they divorced? Was there something else?”

Looking up against the bitter wind, Jason felt like he was talking for no reason. It felt awkward. No one else was around for miles. Yet there he stood, hands in his coat pocket, talking to a grave marker. “Every time I mention grandpa, her face changes. I don’t mention it anymore, but I can't shake the feeling that something happened there.”

“You’ll be glad to know Grandma and I have been getting together almost every week for years now, usually on Thursday nights. We play games. It’s nice. And, I guess, a useful way to keep tabs on her mind and mobility. You won’t be surprised to know her mind is as sharp as it always was. She can still remember precise dates—down to the day of the week—with ease,” he said aloud again.

“I found another box, too. This one had some documents. I found a copy of my birth certificate I thought was lost. I found your Social Security card. Photos from your wedding. You both looked pretty happy. The deed to Grandma’s house was in there. So was the title to her old car that got junked. There was a folder for her marriage certificate, but it was empty. This got me wondering about why I’d never seen photos from her wedding.”

The mystery behind Grandma Jean’s wedding had become a serious curiosity over the last few weeks. Afraid to broach the topic over Bunco, Jason had spent time Googling and searching Ancestry and calling the Clerk’s Office to find a record. “How come they didn’t have a marriage license? Or a divorce certificate?” he asked aloud.

“The Clerk doesn’t have a record. I called a few other counties. Where else would they have gotten married back in the 60s?” he mused. “Is it possible she never married him? Did she get pregnant with you and raise you for 18 years only to separate the second you graduated high school? Were they ever really together? Did anyone in this family ever actually love anyone?”

The possibility that every relationship in the immediate family was as remote as a desert island seemed to cut as deep as the sporadic, sharp snowflakes. “How is it possible my dad never seemed to love us, my grandfather never respected my grandmother, and through it all you died seemingly 40 years too soon?”

The rose petals whipped back and forth on the ground as a few flakes of snow clung to the sides. “Strange that we put flowers on graves. And why are flowers so expensive? It’s like I laid $20 on the ground,” Jason thought to himself. “Cynical, I know,” he said aloud.

Walking back to his car, visions of the funeral flashed in his mind. The tent. The mound of dirt covered by the bright green turf against the snow. People straggling up and down the hill. The two men with the cemetery leaning on shovels in the distance.

Chapter 6

“I went out to mom’s grave yesterday. Things look nice out there. They’re keeping things tidy.”

Rustling in the cabinet for a coffee mug, Grandma didn’t turn away. “Did you lay any flowers?”

“Roses.”

“Those were always her favorites. I wish I could get out there more. Leave some flowers or something.” Left unsaid was her increasing desire not to venture out far from home or drive except to the grocery store. Or be out in the extreme cold. She always was a thin wisp of a woman. A strong Midwestern breeze could cut straight into your soul.

“We’ll go sometime in the spring when it gets warmer,” I said, pulling the Bunco set from the drawer.

“Do you want a cup of coffee?

“Sure. Bunco okay?”

“Sure.”

“I was out at the house the other day. I’m not sure it’s worth a whole lot but I figure it’s time to sell it and move on.”

“Your grandfather built that house for $6,000 back in ‘69. I suspect it’s worth at least more than that,” she said with a high note and chuckle.

“When did you move into this house?” I said, shuffling the loose Bunco score sheets in the box.

“Your grandfather paid for this house in ‘87, I guess.”

I let the pause fill the air. “Round 1,” I said, handing her a reused score sheet.

“How’d you end up here?” I finally asked. I should have known her stoicism wasn’t going to reveal anything on her own without being asked.

“Back then this whole road was pretty empty. The subdivisions down the street came twenty years later. But the county had just run some power lines down the road and the land was pretty cheap, I guess. He had it built for about $13,000. I don’t know what that is today.”

I picked up my phone as she picked up the dice and did a quick Google search. “That’s about $37,000 today,” I said, setting my phone back down. “You keep saying he had this place built. Did you get to decide anything?”

“Well, he never really lived here.” She rolled a perfect 2-2-2. “Bunco,” she said, void of any emotion. “We’d been living in your mom and dad’s house,” she started.

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“One day a tow truck company called and said they’d picked up your grandfather’s truck on the highway over in Scottsville. He said he was going to be at a job site somewhere else. So that’s when I knew he was seeing that other woman. He went over there, and his truck broke down.”

“I had a vague notion about her,” I said. At his funeral, they were both briefly there and gave each other considerable space. I remember Delores — “that other woman”, as grandma always called her — leaving the room during the visitation until grandma left. That may have been the only time they were ever in a room together.

“Did you love him?” I blurted out, rolling a useless straight 4-5-6.

“He was a good man at times. After he got caught with her, he moved out and bought me this house here. Your mom was about out of high school. A couple years later, she moved out with your dad.” She took a long sip of her coffee. It seemed hard to swallow.

A Hemingway quote stuck in the back of my mind. “I think it was in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I don’t know why that just reminded me,” I said, jotting down a score.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, picking up the dice. That was her way of saying she was done talking about that subject.

“Anyway, I figure I’ll call a Realtor soon and get the house appraised and all that.”

“This is round 6, right?”

“Yeah.” After a pause I had to ask, “Is there anything there you might want? I have a feeling a lot of what’s left is going to have to go to Goodwill.”

She thought for a moment, as if scanning her mental map of the inside of the house. “No, I don’t guess so. Maybe some pictures, I guess.”

Chapter 7

Even when it feels complicit, the routine of life has a way of becoming uncomfortable. It had been nearly two decades since Jason’s mom died, and every Thursday evening for almost as long, Jason and Grandma Jean sat at her kitchen table playing games. Sometimes there were fat stacks of Uno cards. One year for her birthday Jason gifted her an elegant new Mexican Train Dominoes set. Still, they frequently reached for the ordinary domino set that must have dated to the sixties. The sides of some of the tiles had been rubbed down into comfortable grooves.

Somehow Bunco was always the game of choice. Three dice and a sheet of paper was all they needed. The game had an elegant simplicity that granted plenty of time to talk between throws with enough complexity to keep everyone focused. Sometimes Grandma Jean would invite her distant cousin Pauline to play. The chatter was a useful way to assess Pauline’s mental decline until her eventual death from Alzheimer’s. Bunco seemed very comfortable for everyone given its rhythmic repetition, right up until a round ends in an abrupt 21 points.

It seemed fitting, then, that Jason missed documenting so much of his grandmother’s decline. In retrospect, it should have seemed curious that Grandma Jean wasn’t drinking as much during games. Then, just within a few weeks, she didn’t even have the coffee brewed at all. By the time her voice started to give, it was too late.

Doctors diagnosed her with a tumor, likely cancerous, in her throat. This was almost how it had to be. Back in the seventies, she’d traveled to the Mayo Clinic for a then-experimental radiation therapy on a cancerous growth in her esophagus, likely an outgrowth of years of generationally-mandated smoking. She quit cold turkey, underwent the radiation, and lived on to see her daughter graduate high school, marry, have a son, separate, and then die.

Given her age and being such a whisp of a woman, doctors either didn’t see much hope or much point in trying anything this time. “We can’t give her radiation until she builds her strength back up. And we can’t build her strength back up because she can’t swallow any real food,” they said. Reduced to a mere whisper, lying in a hospital bed, she confessed she hadn’t been able to eat much for a couple of weeks. It was only when she couldn’t swallow water any longer the dehydration caught everyone’s attention.

Grandma Jean died in March. She went from rolling Buncos to dead in the span of a few weeks. Depending on a person’s perspective, it was either a blissfully rapid way to go or painfully slow. The funeral was sparsely attended. Nearly everyone else had already died or long since bounced out of orbit.

At the graveside service, mere feet away from her daughter, it snowed. A small caravan of friends and well-wishers departed the cemetery. They left behind dozens of small pots of plants and flowers, none of which were designed to hold up for even a minute outdoors in any part of a Midwestern weather front.

The process of grieving turned into sorting and filtering through belongings. Among the light possessions she retained were some photographs, including ones of Jason’s mom he’d never seen before. Sitting in the dim living room late one evening, the amber hue of a lightbulb that was probably as old as the house cast the unmistakable glow of warmth he’d come to appreciate, particularly in the winter.

An auction house was called in to help move some of the dressers, cabinets, and other sturdy, solid wood furniture, unlike anything else people can find today. Aside from some photographs, documents, and a few trinkets, Jason reserved the kitchen table and moved it into his own kitchen along with a deck of cards, half of which was worn from Euchure games. The handcrafted Mexican Train Dominoes set stayed with it. The six dice, which forever rattled around in a sandwich-size Ziploc baggie, came, too.

Sometimes, on a Thursday evening, Jason would open the junk drawer and see the dice. Half the set featured neatly worn pips. A thick stack of paper scorecards would make for a nice winter activity, scanning and digitizing them to serve as backup copies. Like photos in a shoebox, but instead scraps of notepad paper with tally marks and initials.

It was in these moments he’d consider a cup of coffee—decaf, usually—and sit down at the table with his iPad and poke and tap at PlayBunco.com for a few minutes. Long enough to sip a cup of decaf after dinner. Sometimes it would rain “a good rain”, as his grandmother would say. Sometimes there was a “gentle snow.” But usually it was quiet, peaceful, and comfortable.