The garbage bag in the median spasms at the passing truck, its flailing edges uncovering loose brown hair and patches of something blue-white. The wrong color for a face. I open my mouth to gasp, but my chest seizes up, so I drop the tire iron instead. Backwash from a truck makes the bag suck and billow like my emphysemic grandfather. I turn my back. I want to cry because I’m so late now, Gram will think I’m not coming.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The last time I went to visit, I found them on opposite sides of the room. Gram sat looking out the window and my grandfather by the piano in his wheelchair, sucking on a clear plastic oxygen tether, raising and lowering his shoulders to make the black cavity in his chest do its job. They must have been fighting—her rage was always cold and distant. She didn’t help him stand to greet me, didn’t even turn when I came in. I went to an equidistant chair.
Without turning away from the window, Gram began talking. Quietly, to the window, eyes shiny with the pain of her intent. ‘Your grandfather loved to play the piano at parties,’ she said, ‘because it would make all the women crowd around him.’
Her lower lip vibrated as she heaved to breathe, like her lungs were corseted. Sitting in a chair behind everyone, she said, she watched him show off, holding a cigarette between his teeth and flicking his eyebrows. Her cheeks were wet now, but she just fingered the tissue in her lap.
‘Right in front of me,’ she whispered, ‘I watched him play one-handed and put his other hand up the skirt of the woman standing next to him. Everyone laughed.’ She shook her head. ‘It was like they were laughing at me.’
Then she shrugged. ‘There were some things nobody talked about,’ she told me, still looking out the window. ‘It was a different time,’ she said.
The weight of her words made my lungs feel corseted too, and I wondered why tell me now. Or at all. I looked from her to my grandfather, but said nothing.
‘There was a war on,’ my grandfather said. But he avoided my eyes.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
The cops arrive, and then an ambulance with no sirens. I have nothing to say, so it doesn’t take long for them to interview me. The body is probably a missing woman from the city, one of them says. He’s not supposed to tell me anything, but figures I might want to know. I don’t. I don’t want to know how she got here, and I don’t want to have seen her breathless, blue face. They thank me, but I don’t know why, because I’m too late for her too. There’s a war on, I think.
Then it occurs to me what Gram knew that day—why tell me the story, why they fought. Somehow, now she knows the shame that strangled me too, ever since I was fifteen. I never told her, I think I was afraid to—that she would be cold and distant to me too. Shame that should have been my grandfather’s, that we each carried alone. Thinking, if we don’t tell anyone, it’s like it didn’t happen. I watch the EMTs roll the stretcher back to the ambulance. I exhale. Except that it keeps happening.
One cop finishes changing my tire for me, and I drive too fast for the last two miles. Gram is alone in the pew up front, sitting straight and hard like granite. When I slide quietly in beside her, she reaches for my hand and squeezes. The black lace in front of her face sways in and out. I breathe now too.