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.

To be continued...