Chapter 32
Peanuts! Peanuts here!”
The peanut vendor strolls down the aisle of the stadium. Gramps is contentedly munching on Cracker Jacks. I’d found the one snack counter that sells them, to Gramps’s delight.
He and Daniel don’t even notice the peanut guy—I mean, really, how adorable is it that someone is walking around selling peanuts in little paper bags?—because they’re deep in conversation about the third inning.
“I haven’t seen a bases-clearing triple like that in years.”
“And the way Ramirez shot that line drive straight to center field!”
I sip my lemonade and watch them chat, not exactly listening, their baseball terms floating gently over my head. And then I check Slack on my phone for the hundredth time, because it’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m playing hooky from work.
After a while, Gramps notices that I’m typing messages every few minutes. “If they fire you, you can stay with me, rent-free.” He says it nonchalantly, squinting out into the field, grinning as he pops another handful of Cracker Jacks into his mouth.
“Thanks,” I laugh. It’s too bad that shacking up with your grandpa isn’t an actual life plan.
Not much happens for the next hour, it feels like, but Gramps and Daniel don’t run out of things to talk about.
Gramps didn’t ask me any questions about why we brought Daniel to the game with us.
Trish would be asking why the property manager’s here; my mom would be asking when we’re going to send out save-the-dates.
But Gramps is just happy to be here, and happy to talk baseball with Daniel.
And I am, too. I’m rather pleased with myself for having the brilliant idea to take Gramps to a game. It feels like the perfect last hurrah.
Not to mention that it gives me a few extra hours to stare at Daniel.
I have fully accepted that nothing is meant to happen between us, but that doesn’t mean I’m oblivious to the way I feel about him.
I have a huge crush. I enjoy looking at him and talking to him and being with him, and that’s okay.
A crush doesn’t hurt anyone. Not when you have realistic expectations about what can or can’t happen.
After several more innings, I’m starting to get a bit restless, sitting in the stands with no action to pretend to pay attention to.
The other team scores, then more things happen or don’t happen (I’m not sure), and then the game is over and the Rays have won, six to one.
I silently thank the baseball gods that I just happened to take Gramps to a winning game.
As we’re filing out of the stands, Gramps says, “I can’t thank you both enough. Taking an old geezer like me out to a ball game is a mitzvah, that’s for certain. And it was nice talking to you, young man. You remind me a lot of your father.”
Even as we’re jostled by the crowd around us, one glance at Daniel’s face tells me how much this compliment means to him. As we reach the end of the stairs, Daniel reaches out to steady Gramps by the elbow, somehow communicating compassion and respect with a single, wordless touch.
Daniel interrupts these thoughts by saying, “Leonard, if you feel like getting out again this weekend, my mom is having her annual family barbecue. She’d be happy for you to join us.”
“I’m sure Mallory and I would be delighted.” Gramps beams. “Thank you.”
Daniel looks around at me sharply. “You’ll still be here?”
“Leaving on Sunday. But if you don’t want—”
Daniel waves away my protests. “The more the merrier. It’s Saturday at noon. Wally’s welcome to come, too.”
“Can we bring anything?”
“Please. My mom would be insulted.”
We find our way back to Daniel’s car. As he drives us back to Sandy Shores, the two of them discuss baseball, real estate, local gossip, and more baseball, and I lean my head against the back-seat window, smiling to myself. At least I know that Gramps will have a friend in Daniel after I’m gone.
It’s Friday, my last day of virtual work, and there’s no way I can focus. I’m torn between the desire to spend time with Gramps and the desire to work on Pebble Cottage. In the end, I dither around, not really doing either.
I’ve put off booking my ticket home, so now it’s painfully expensive. But I finally rip off the Band-Aid and buy a ticket to Seattle, leaving Sunday morning.
Gramps finds me in my room in the early afternoon as I’m folding my clothes and slowly stacking them into my suitcase.
“Packing already?” he asks. Then he spies my laptop, which is open on top of the dresser with a Zoom meeting on the screen, the volume so low it’s barely audible. “Oops.” He holds one finger to his lips.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re muted, and I’m not really listening anyway.” I fold the black dress from Bettina’s, then take it out and roll it up instead.
Gramps sits on the edge of the bed. “Lottie always rolled her clothes when she packed. Said it kept things from wrinkling.”
“She told me the same thing. She always had clever little tricks.” I sit back on my heels. “She told me about boot shapers back when I went through a riding boot phase. And she got me these tiny sachets filled with lavender to put in my dresser drawers.”
“To keep away moths,” Gramps says.
“And to keep your clothes smelling fresh.”
“Lavender still makes me think of her,” he says quietly.
“I miss her.”
Gramps just smiles, as if at a distant memory, gazing into the other room, where Wally sleeps on the couch.
“I bet she would have some sort of pep talk for me right now,” I continue. “Something to get me pumped up to return to work.”
“Oh, let’s think. What would she say about it?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t want to speculate, really.
I just wish, with a bone-deep heaviness, that I could have one last conversation with my grandmother.
And I’m sure Gramps does, too. I try to lighten the mood a little.
“I’m sure if she could see the state I’m leaving Pebble Cottage in, she’d regret leaving it to me. ”
Gramps doesn’t laugh. He gives me a shrewd look and says, “Have I ever told you the story of how she found that house?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t know Lottie was the one who found it.”
“We had moved here from Cincinnati a few years before. We’d been living in an apartment over a butcher shop—now, that wasn’t a problem, because Stan, the butcher, gave us discounted cuts on Shabbat—but the apartment had a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, which was used by two other families.
We’d been saving every penny we could—darning our socks, making one pot of soup last three or four days—to someday buy a house.
When Lottie was pregnant with your mother, she took to riding her bike around different neighborhoods on her way to work—”
“I thought her boss wouldn’t let her work while she was pregnant,” I interrupt.
“That’s true. So she hid both of her pregnancies until the very end, when she looked like she was smuggling a beach ball under her dress. The doctor advised her on how not to gain more than fifteen pounds or so.”
“Yikes.”
“Your mom and Trish turned out fine. Anyway, one morning she rode past Pebble Cottage. The next-door neighbor was out watering his grass, and she stopped to talk to him. Asked if anyone on the block would be moving soon. Said he had no idea. But she liked the look of that street, so she kept coming back. Struck up a conversation with whoever she met. One day, a woman on the other side of the cul-de-sac told her that the owners of Pebble Cottage were moving to Scottsdale to be closer to their grandkids. The woman didn’t know if they’d be selling the house or keeping it, and she wouldn’t give Lottie their phone number when she asked.
Lottie knocked on their door, but they weren’t home that morning, and she didn’t want to wait around.
So when she got to work, she looked up the local realtors in the phone book and called every one of them.
Finally, one of them admitted he was familiar with that address, that the owner was planning to list it the following week. ”
Gramps shrugs and makes a little poof sound as if to say, That was that . But I’m on the edge of my seat—metaphorically speaking, since I’m still sitting on the floor. “So how did she get it?”
“She talked the realtor into selling it directly to us. Laid it on thick about how we were a young, hardworking couple with a baby on the way, said we had enough cash for a down payment, and that we’d take excellent care of the house.
He conferred with the owners, and it turned out they were delighted to sell the place to a young family.
It had been their family home, too, see.
They liked the idea of the house getting another chance at life, at watching a family grow up. ”
Suddenly I’m blinking back tears—I’m getting emotional for a house.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that story. I knew Lottie loved the house, but I didn’t know the lengths she went to in order to get it.”
Gramps strides across the room and picks up the oval picture frame, the one with the picture of a young Lottie and my mom on the beach.
“She never did anything by half measures,” he says.
“She had conviction. It was one of the first things I loved about her. If she wanted something, she got it. And if she didn’t care for something, or someone, well, she wouldn’t waste a minute on them.
Life was for living, she said, more than once—not for twiddling your thumbs. ”
Someone on my work meeting coughs loudly. I glare at the computer. Gramps looks at it too, and wordlessly shakes his head.
“What?” I ask, hearing an edge of defensiveness in my voice.
He raises his fluffy white eyebrows, mildly surprised. “I didn’t say a word.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Anyway, I’ll let you pack.” Gramps retreats down the hallway. I hear him sigh as he settles next to Wally and flips open the newspaper.
I turn the volume up slightly on my laptop so I can hear the end of this meeting.
I finish packing the clothes I know I won’t need this weekend.
As voices drone on about metrics and quality standards, I gaze at the little photograph.
Lottie was so beautiful—her beaming smile, dark curls floating above her shoulders in the breeze—and I realize with a jolt that she was around my age when the picture was taken.
Mother of one with another on the way, a woman with enough conviction and courage to become a public defender when nobody wanted her to.
Not her parents, not the professors who graded the female students harsher than the men in the class, not her bosses and co-workers.
But she didn’t let that stop her. I picture her living in a run-down apartment, stretching her grocery dollars to the limit, hitting the streets day after day to find a house for her family, not taking no for an answer.
Guilt and regret settle heavily on my shoulders as I picture the state I’m leaving that house in. Unpainted walls, unfinished floors. Empty, abandoned.
I barely register what I’m doing as I close my laptop and gather my phone and keys. I tell Gramps I’m going out. Half an hour later, I’m wheeling my bike up to Pebble Cottage.