She loved her DVD player, Grandma Suzette.
Too much, probably. She didn’t get out a whole lot, and physically she was something of a mess.
Mom, Dad and I used to drive over there fairly often and take her out to this Italian restaurant where they had unlimited garlic bread. She would take any that was leftover home in a doggy bag.
Anyway, she died of this infection thing. I guess old people do that. Their systems are weak, so they get an infection when a young person wouldn’t, and the infection won’t heal, and their blood goes toxic or something and then they’re just dead.
We visited her in the hospital a few times before it happened, and my throat felt completely closed with tears that weren’t coming out because she looked so bony and gray, like her skin was made of crumpled tissue paper. I told her I loved her and brought her a metal box of peppermints and then it was really hard to know what to say—because she was so sick it just seemed wrong to tell her about my day, and we couldn’t make plans for the future because although we didn’t know she was going to die, it seemed pretty likely at that point, and generally it was just agony.
The last thing she said to me was “I’m going to take a nap now. Don’t drink my orange juice.”
I didn’t drink her juice, but we had to go home before she woke up and thirty-six hours later she was dead.
“Don’t drink my orange juice.”
That was it.
It wasn’t a real goodbye.
It was so unfinished.
I hate it when things are unfinished. When you’re not sure what people meant. Why did she think I would drink her orange juice? I had never tried to drink her orange juice.
Or had I? Drunk some once, back when I was a little kid, and she was remembering that time?
There was going to be a funeral. My sick alcoholic uncle Hanson came up from Portland. He always makes my dad really tense, he’s such a messed-up guy, and he stayed in a hotel but we had to have him over for dinner. He brought his own bottle of whisky and drank the whole thing right in the middle the meal like it was normal. But his mother had just died and it wasn’t exactly the time for an intervention, plus Dad has already talked to him about his drinking like a million times and Hanson never listened. All in all it was a pretty shattering weekend.
The funeral was at this place in Bothell near Grandma Suzette’s condo, and it was surprising how much Bible stuff was in the speeches people gave, given that we’re Christian but we don’t go to church. I was wearing a black dress and a dark blue cotton sweater and sitting in the front row with my parents, but I knew Noel and Meghan and our friend Hutch were in the back because I rode with them to the funeral parlor in Meghan’s Jeep.
I cried at the funeral because people were giving these speeches where they stood up and talked about Grandma. And her friends stood up, these old ladies, and spoke about how much they had loved her and whatever. It was just really sad.
After it was over we all had to drive to the cemetery and I was in the bathroom trying to get my face to stop shining after the tears, putting powder on my nose, when Meghan called in, “They’re making me move my car. Can you get a ride with your parents?”
I said yes, but then when I left the bathroom I couldn’t see my parents anywhere. The area in front of the funeral parlor was a sea of people dressed in black, old women with dyed hair putting their hands on each other’s arms, cousins of my dad’s looking faded and balding, a few little girls running underfoot wearing white tights on chubby legs. I ran outside and looked for our Honda. It was gone.
I didn’t want to get into a car with Hanson so I stood up on the porch and surveyed my options. Who else could give me a ride?
There was Nora Van Deusen. Standing by a hedge and not talking to anyone. There with her hands at her sides, staring into space awkwardly.
Nora.
Nora had come to my grandma’s funeral.
She saw me just as I saw her, and loped over. Nora is five eleven and has tremendous hooters. She was poured somewhat awkwardly into a navy dress that she probably got for church a year ago. It no longer really fit. She was holding a bouquet of white roses.
“Hi,” she said when she got to me.
“Hey.” I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m really sorry about your grandma,” said Nora. “She was such a kind person.” She thrust the flowers into my hands, not meeting my eyes.
Nora knew Grandma Suzette because she and I had been friends from third grade until the end of junior year. You know people’s grandmas when you’re friends for that long. She’d even had sleepovers at Grandma Suzette’s, and the two of us had stayed up late playing with the practically a hundred drugstore lipsticks Grandma had in her bathroom. And freshman year, Grandma took me, Kim, Cricket and Nora to see The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet, even though we were kind of too old for it by then.
“How did you know she died?” I asked.
“Meghan told me.”
“Oh.”
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” Nora said. Because that’s the thing to say at funerals, I guess.
We stood there for a few moments in silence. “How’s your summer been?” she finally asked me.
“Pretty good. Aside from the death,” I said. “How’s yours?”
“Did I tell you I met a guy?”
“You haven’t been speaking to me,” I reminded her.
Nora blushed. “I met a guy.”
Oh.
That’s why she wasn’t so mad at me anymore.
It wasn’t that she missed me so much she decided to forgive me.
She had stopped liking Noel.
“I met him at Sunny Meadows,” Nora went on.
Sunny Meadows was a day camp connected to Nora’s church. She was a sports leader for them that summer, until August, when her parents would take her to Decatur Island.
“That’s great,” I said.
“He goes to Lakeside,” she said. “His name is—don’t laugh.”
“What?”
“Say you won’t laugh.”
“I won’t laugh.”
“His name is Happy. Happy Mackenzie.”
I had heard of Happy Mackenzie, actually. He was stroke for the Lakeside heavy eight, and Jackson, who was a rower, had been at some kind of crew team sports intensive with him. It’s not the kind of name people forget.
“And is it a thing thing?” I asked.
“We went out twice last week,” Nora said. “And I see him every day at Sunny Meadows. So yeah.”
“A thing thing.”
“Pretty much so.” She grinned.
Nora has never had a boyfriend her whole entire life. Not that she isn’t attractive—she’s got gorgeous curls and huge boobs and she understands basketball, plus she can bake—but somehow she’s never gone out with anyone. “That’s really great,” I said.
This was like, the most generic thing anyone could say in such a situation, but Nora and I had been angry at each other for so long I didn’t feel like I could just dive in and interrogate her about Happy’s kissing ability or his giant crew muscles or any of the things I would normally want to know about.
“Did you read about the gay male penguins at the Chinese zoo?” I asked.
Nora looked at me funny. “No.”
“Yeah, well, there are gay penguins. That’s a documented fact. But these particular gay penguins kept trying to steal eggs from the straight penguins.”
Nora looked at me like: where was I going with this?
“They would steal an egg and leave behind a rock as substitute,” I continued. “To try and trick the biological parents. Then the gay ones would adopt the egg. Zookeepers kept taking away the egg and giving it back to the bio parents, and they kept stealing another one, again and again.”
Nora shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true,” I said. “Finally the gay couple had to be segregated from the other penguins with a little picket fence, because they wouldn’t stop trying to get a baby of their own.”