21. Zoe
Zoe
Iwas on pins and needles all day Sunday waiting for my grandmother to get home.
She’d seemed nice enough on the phone, but kind of reserved.
Of course the first time I spoke with her she assumed I was a scammer.
The second time she had all the evidence showing who I really was, but she’d still been pretty neutral with me.
Not that I expected her to be bubbly and effusive on the phone, but I had thought she’d be more excited to learn about me.
I wasn’t sure if it was because of what happened with my mother, or if she was just waiting to see how things worked out.
She’d invited me to come see her, so I guessed that meant she really did want to meet me.
When she found out I was in Seattle, she’d offered to come home early from Europe.
I’d told her to finish her trip, that I’d see her when she got back, but now that the time was approaching, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
“What time is my grandmother due back?” I asked Gretchen as I paced back and forth in the dining room.
She looked up from her computer with a smirk. “Four o’clock, assuming that her flight’s on time and traffic isn’t awful.”
“How will we know when she’s here?”
“Oh we’ll know, believe me. Your grandmother likes to make an entrance.”
The doorbell rang just before four-thirty. I was sorting socks from the laundry and I damn near jumped out of my skin at the sound even though I was expecting it.
“That’ll be Jan.”
Gretchen went to the door, but I was frozen in place, remembering how excited I’d been to find my father, only to realize why my mother had told me he was dead.
I was pretty sure my grandmother wasn’t a psycho – Gretchen wouldn’t be friends with her if she was – but I also knew that sometimes people presented very different personalities when no one else was watching them.
“Where is she?”
I stood up as a woman came barreling through the door looking for me.
My grandmother was petite, short and thin, but there was nothing frail about her.
She was wearing a pair of blindingly white Nikes and a purple tracksuit, the jacket open to reveal a white tee shirt that read Italians Do It for Pasta.
Despite the fact that she’d just got off an international flight she was bristling with energy.
She rushed over then stopped about two feet away from me, taking me in, her eyes wide and mouth open in shock.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “You’re the spitting image of your mother. I’d know you anywhere.”
Then, to my surprise, she pulled me into a tight hug. I stood stiffly in her embrace for a few seconds before my body relaxed against her.
“Welcome home,” my grandmother whispered.
To my surprise, tears pricked against my eyes for the first time since I was a little girl. I blinked them back and hugged my grandmother even tighter.
“Thank you Gretchen for watching my house and entertaining my granddaughter.”
I swear Gretchen blushed at that. “No problem.”
“Should we go home?” my grandmother suggested.
My eyes went to Gretchen, who gave me an encouraging smile.
“Sure, let me get my stuff.”
My grandmother looked between me and her neighbor. “You’ve been staying here the whole time?”
“Yeah, I felt weird about staying in your house when I’d never even met you,” I explained. “Gretchen put me up here.”
She hurried over to give Gretchen a hug. “You’re such a good friend, dear.”
I met Gretchen’s eyes over her shoulder and smirked. If only my grandmother knew exactly how much of a friend she’d been.
“Gretchen, please come join us for dinner tomorrow after work.”
Gretchen looked towards me. “Are you on shift tomorrow, Zoe?”
“Wait, you’ve got a job here in Seattle?” my grandmother asked in surprise.
I nodded. “I got hired for an on-call shift at a family homeless shelter.”
Grandma’s smile was huge. “That’s great news. Do you work tomorrow?”
“Not until Tuesday, unless someone calls out sick.”
“Well that gives us plenty of time to get acquainted then. And we’ll have Gretchen for dinner to thank her for all her help.”
“It really was no bother,” Gretchen said. “But you know I’ll never say no to a home cooked meal from you Jan.”
I grabbed my duffel from the guest room and followed my grandmother over to her house, ignoring the stab of pain that hit my belly as I walked away from Gretchen. She looked sad about it too, but we’d both known this was coming.
“This was your mother’s room,” my grandmother told me as she led me into the bedroom that was the mirror image of Gretchen’s guest room. “You can stay in here.”
If I expected my grandmother to be tired from her trip I was wrong. She bustled around checking on the house, then when she remembered that she didn’t have any groceries she brought me with her to the grocery store, asking me what I liked.
She kept up a constant chatter the entire time, telling me about her trip and her friends and asking me casual questions about hobbies and my life in Chicago. I realized after a while that she was nervous, which made me like her even more. She had to care about me and what I thought to be nervous.
“What do you want me to call you?” I asked when we sat down for dinner.
She frowned. “What do you want to call me?”
“Does grandma work?” I asked.
For a second I thought she was going to cry. “Yes, Grandma works just fine, dear.”
After that she seemed calmer. We both waited until after dinner to bring up the elephant in the room.
“I suppose you want to know about what happened with your mother?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“She never mentioned me or her grandfather?” Grandma asked.
“No, whenever I asked about our family she just said that she was an orphan, and she didn’t know who my father was.
But she always kept this little metal lockbox with her, every apartment we went to she brought it, and after she passed I went through it and realized that it wasn’t true. We did have family.”
“Your mother was a troubled girl,” Grandma began.
“We probably spoiled her too much as a child, I don’t know, but she grew up to be a willful and defiant teenager.
She was always fighting with her father and putting me in the middle.
She started drinking and smoking pot, coming home high as a kite.
Back then pot was illegal, it’s not like it is now, and your grandfather was very upset. Well, we both were.”
Grandma took a deep, shaky breath.
“Your grandfather worked closely with the police since he was a district attorney, and one of his cop friends told him that your mother was selling drugs. The police had been watching her and her boyfriend and were preparing a case against them. We were beside ourselves. We didn’t raise our daughter to be a drug dealer! ”
She stopped, staring into space.
“What happened next?” I prompted.
“We confronted her, and your mother got very upset. She started throwing things, then she packed up her stuff and said she was leaving. The last thing she said was, ‘You’re both dead to me.’ We figured she’d be back once she cooled down, but that was the last time we saw her,” Grandma said sadly.
“After your grandfather died, I hired a private investigator who gave me an address in Chicago. I sent her a letter letting her know what happened and asking her to call me, then another one a few months later, but I never heard from her.”
“We moved around a lot,” I said, not wanting to tell her that my mother had kept those letters for years without opening them. It would be too hurtful. “She wasn’t one to forward the mail, too easy for the bill collectors to track her down.”
My grandmother reached across the table to take my hands in hers. Her skin was soft and wrinkly, and I imagined that my hands would look like that someday.
“I just want you to know Zoe, if I’d had any idea that you existed, any at all, I would have fought like hell to get the chance to meet you and get to know you.”
I could have told her about how hard it was growing up with an unstable mother, how constant worrying about if we’d have enough to eat haunted me to this day, what it was like to realize my mother had finally drank herself to death like I always knew she would, but Grandma had been through enough.
“I’m here now,” I said softly. “I’m not going anywhere.”