The Last Grandparent

Patty’s husband always fell asleep before her, and she’d come to enjoy her time lying by his side after he settled into a rhythm of deep, even breaths. She liked the chance to observe him without the threat of being caught, even in the dusky dark, even just the same predictable sounds, or the smells of his big body, which were less predictable. Lately he’d begun to smell like her late grandfather, and tonight she wondered if it was the reason for a lack of sex in recent weeks. He’d started using aftershave, an anachronism she was surprised a grown man would suddenly take up, like a new hobby, the way he slapped it on his face with such self-satisfaction. It probably wasn’t the same aftershave as Grandpa Jack, but the act of using it at all, a musky emanation from the cheeks, was reminiscent enough.  

​

She moved her nostrils close to his large, newly smooth face and tried to remember the man it reminded her of, his pressed shirts tucked into an unfashionably high waist, the way he talked down to her mother like she was the same incorrigible age as Patty—younger than him, that’s all. The old man had died two weeks ago, the last of the grandparents to go. Patty and her husband had flown to Phoenix for the funeral. She’d felt on the plane like everyone going to Phoenix was on their way to a funeral, the way parents were giving young children looks that said on this of all days, behave. But that was ridiculous, not that many people could have died in Phoenix; or rather, she’d have heard about that. She supposed it was just the look parents gave their children, whether they had children of their own or not. 

​

Her mother hadn’t cried at the service, or later when they put Grandpa Jack in the ground, which Patty kept pointing out to her husband. 

​

“I know, hon,” he said the first time, like she needed comforting. “Maybe she’s in shock” and then “maybe she cried in private” and “maybe some people don’t cry,” with an edge, but Patty felt like continuing to bring it up until her husband came up with a maybe-less answer. Finally she came out with it and said “she didn’t like him very much” while they were clearing the extra folding chairs they’d brought, just in case the cemetery didn’t provide enough. But they did, which made the clearing more depressing—they’d overestimated the crowd and maybe the man’s whole life. Patty’s husband said they were “chairs for the ghosts of his old friends,” which made Patty even more depressed, since there was nothing more depressing than the living telling lies about the dead. So she looked over at her dry-eyed mother and said “she didn’t like him very much.” His face fell and he tucked his chin, like he’d never heard an unpleasant family truth, and Patty stared shamelessly at that big, soft picture of embarrassment until he caught her and said, “I don’t know, hon.”

​

Now Patty’s husband stirred and snorted, disrupting the pleasant sounds of his deep sleep—the ambient, metronomic in and out—the sound of her deliberative time alone. But he didn’t catch her looking. She guessed at the content of his dreams. Walking through the tall doors of their next, bigger house with room to spare in a bespoke sweatsuit, through their acreage to the tree house he was building out back in the twisted embrace of a Japanese maple, the ghosts of his friends assembled below him, smiling, handing him the planks, everyone joining forces, everyone liking everyone else.

​

She was mixing up their histories. The Japanese maple was outside her grandparents’ old house—the house Grandpa Jack had said Patty’s mother “pulled out from under” him—the tree Patty and her brother climbed when they were young, dirtying their knees. The risk of three feet, if that, to two kids on a tight leash was memory-making, as was the sound of her Grandpa Jack’s wheezy laugh as their nervous mother beckoned them down, his mocking cries of “Daredevils!” or “Wimps!” and the deep footprints of Patty’s brother’s defiant stomps in the dirt.

​

But the rest was Patty’s husband, who had more hobbies than aftershave, after all, like woodworking; who someday wanted to catch their bundle of kids at the end of an “epic slide,” he said; and who did have scores of unconditional, smiling friends, so many that a couple had even died by now—they’d gone to those funerals, too—and surely they’d want extra chairs set aside at his. 

​

“You’ve got a good guy,” Patty’s mother had said to her during a moment alone, back at Grandpa Jack’s apartment, sorting through the things that an old widower leaves behind: razor blades, starched pinstripe shirts with stained necks, cufflinks of every shape, only a few small pictures and some empty frames, plus that hale and heavy floral smell of always just having barbered, right up until death. “A good guy,” her mother repeated. Patty heard it as a comparison, but didn’t know which villain she was comparing him to: Grandpa Jack? Her ex-husband, Patty’s wild-eyed father? Patty’s stomping brother, missing from the funeral? 

​

“No one’s a good guy,” Patty said, though maybe she’d meant to say “everyone.”  

“Oh just let me say something nice,” her mother retorted. 

​

“Ok, Grandpa Jack was a good guy,” Patty said. “He let me climb his tree.” She wished she’d spoken at the funeral. Instead they’d let the Masons lead the way: hearty, fraternal stuff, aprons and evergreen figs and all. She searched her mother’s face as the weight of welling tears hit her own. It was the articulation of a small, unspoken thing that brought it on, a memory with “he” and—perhaps more importantly—“me,” her own life being the most precious stone to turn. Plus the gentle, girlish rhyme of threes in “tree,” like the gangly kid herself had reached through Patty to say it: he let me climb his tree. Drip, drop. Perhaps that’s why Patty’s mother had let the pastor and the Worshipful Master spar and the ceremony devolve into more jurisdictional performance than personal rite. Why she couldn’t meet her daughter’s eyes—though she must have felt her crying there beside her—no matter how blatantly Patty stared at her inscrutable face while she yanked the drawstrings of a black bag full of clothing, like it was any other trash. She didn’t want reminders of small incidents—the many characters, good and bad, he may have played—or to see him through anyone else’s teary eyes, for fear she’d betray her own. 

​

Sure of her dislike, she packed up his things and moved on back to Chicago. And Patty back to Portland, with a pair of cufflinks for her husband, and an unframed picture for herself, of that old house with the Japanese maple out front, Grandpa Jack barely visible, waving in the curtained bay window to whoever took it; a picture, it turned out, that he kept on his bedside table, prized above the others—a precious picture of himself. 

 

And Patty’s husband dreamed of his armful of children, the essential goodness of himself reflected in their gaze. He was a practical personality. He came to the conclusions that suited his desires, whatever was necessary to put one foot in front of the other, happy to amend them later on. Not Patty. She lay beside him, happiest when her good guy was at rest, happiest taking no steps at all toward that long and fruitful life he dreamed of, unless she knew for certain what could take forever to determine: that their kids—daredevils! wimps—would really remember that plushy hug at the end of the epic slide, a wheezy laugh and a friendly wave along with all the awful, selfish rest of it; that her man, their father, to them could be, would be, everything at once.