3. JOSIE
JOSIE
Before her diagnosis, that is.
Now she often sleeps in, naps during the day, and goes to bed at eight. However, she often gets up at night, somehow managing to know when I come and go. Old people are a mystery.
Sleepless, tired, a nervous wreck, I shove the blanket off me and get out of bed. My wet clothes are on the floor, and I throw them in the laundry basket. The sour smell of rain seems to have saturated this entire house.
I put on a fresh pair of jeans and a pullover.
Since I moved here from the city, my style has hit an all-time low.
But this town doesn’t have standards. Not really.
Which suits me just fine. Carelessness and indifference are alarmingly easy to get used to, and I’m doing a stellar job.
After the scandal in Pittsburgh, I don’t want to draw attention.
I walk to the kitchen and turn on the light.
Nothing much has changed at Grandma’s house since I moved out six years ago.
The house is a comforting mix of old and new.
Built-in kitchen cupboards that date to the 1940s but new appliances.
Old cast-iron cookware that Grandma adores though it weighs a hundred pounds but a new coffee machine.
Vintage four-poster beds in both bedrooms but five-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets.
Old hardwood floors but Clarks slippers and Sorel boots by the door.
Grandma is subscribed to Time magazine “to keep up with the current affairs” and rewatches Schitt’s Creek, but the words "your generation" and “back in my day” are used more often than good morning or good night.
And of course, there’s still that ridiculous wooden sign hanging above the fridge: Home is where breakfast is.
It’s dawn but still raining. It’s going to be another gloomy semi-dark day in Burnville.
Even the flowery curtains over the kitchen window look sad.
So do the storks on the wallpaper trim. In the summer, Central Pennsylvania is beautiful, but at this time of year, from fall to early spring, everything is a different shade of gray and gloomy, including people’s attitudes.
The only cheerful things in the house are my red-and-green plush socks that Grandma gave me for Christmas.
She actually gave them to me in February when I moved here to take care of her.
Gave them to me right before she updated me on her diagnosis, or the worst part of it—her cancer had taken an aggressive turn, yet she still declined chemo treatment.
“And that’s that. Case closed. And I won’t discuss this. ”
That’s Grandma. My grandfather passed from cancer, too. This is a vicious circle.
She didn’t want me to move back. “Nothing for you to do in this town.” It didn’t even dawn on me when she asked me to come for a visit what it was about. Until she said she needed to give me “instructions” about how to handle the estate after she’s gone.
“There’s no way around it. It’s time,” she said.
That’s when I realized that she didn’t have much time left.
I cried.
She only patted me on the shoulder. “It’s life.”
“It’s unfair, is what it is,” I sobbed, looking with teary eyes at the only family I had left.
“You’ll be all right, sweetheart.”
I push the on button on the coffee maker and start the batter for pancakes—anything to kill time and not think about the upcoming day or what it might bring. I suck at making pancakes, though making batter from scratch is easy if you follow Grandma’s recipe to a tee.
I hear the creak of the floor and the squeak of the door—of course, of all days, today is when Grandma gets up earlier than usual. She must’ve gotten up the same time as I did. These days, it takes her quite a while to get dressed, but she refuses help. She’s so stubborn.
She walks into the kitchen in her ironed blue pants, a knitted sweater over a white turtleneck, and slippers. Her hair is a beautiful shade of gray, thick and long, tied into a braid at the back and almost reaching her waist.
“I’m not planning on looking like a plucked chicken after all those chemicals they pump into me,” she said when they went through treatment options. “I’m too old for that stuff.”
She’s not even eighty. But again—stubborn. She loves her hair, too. She doesn’t care that I want her around longer.
“Is everything all right?” she asks without looking at me. She walks up to the counter and gently nudges me away. “Let me.” She takes the whisk from me. “You came in late last night,” she says in her monotonous voice. She doesn’t ask, she simply states the facts. “Didn’t turn on the light.”
See? It’s like she knows. Old people are like that. They look at you like they can see through you, and they ask questions so intuitively that it’s like they have surveillance on you.
“Yes. Everything is fine,” I say, pouring two cups of coffee. “Didn’t want to wake you.”
I realize that every move of mine is slow and careful today.
Thievish. I feel like a criminal, though being a witness to a hit-and-run and fleeing the scene doesn’t make me one.
Another thing I realize is that it’s not the crime per se that puts me on edge but the fact that it’s him.
I didn’t know that man at all. He carried a faint sense of wrongness with him last night, though I can’t explain it.
I check the time again. 7:07.
They deliver the local newspaper around this time.
I usually go through it at work. You’d be surprised how entertaining and insane life can be in the middle of nowhere.
At least on paper. Drug busts. Town council squabbles.
Neighboring town schools’ rivalry. City code violations. More criminal charges.
Today, though, I’m itching to find out if the hit-and-run from yesterday made the news. It’s a nasty itch, like a rash that doesn’t go away and only seems to spread the more you think about it. It makes me check the Victorian-style clock on the wall above the fridge every minute.
Grandma starts the stove, and the first ladleful of batter against the hot frying pan makes a loud searing noise, sending steam in the air.
The sound triggers the memory of the accident, making dread creep up my back.
“Gonna go get the newspaper,” I blurt and run through the living room out onto the front porch.
It’s still raining, but I don’t care. The blue plastic pouch with the newspaper is already on the front porch.
That’s pretty much all we use the front door for—newspaper and deliveries.
I fetch the newspaper, get back inside, and right there, by the door, pull it from its protective sleeve.
I check the front page—nothing.
Second page—nothing.
I open the crime section—nothing.
I scan “Hello, Stranger,” the weird but entertaining section that prints messages, thoughts, and random complaints of the locals who can email or call the newspaper office for that very reason.
Still nothing.
It doesn’t help calm my nerves. Quite the opposite. If the accident is not in the paper, that means that either no one has reported the body yet or the news didn’t make it to today’s print run.
“What time do they print this?” I ask loudly as I walk back into the kitchen.
Grandma expertly flips the buttermilk pancakes in the pan. “Usually by two in the morning. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Anything exciting?”
“Same old.”
“Same old is good,” she murmurs. She knows it like no one else, after what she went through in this town.
I dump my coffee in the sink, rinse my cup, and pick up my purse.
“Leaving so early?”
“Gotta go to work,” I say.
“Now?”
It’s early for me, I agree. But I can’t sit around. Not today.
“Have some pancakes while they are warm,” Grandma offers.
“I’ll eat at the diner,” I say, putting on my boots.
“Josie.”
“Gotta go, Grams.”
She knows I don’t eat breakfast, and I’m not into pancakes, which are her favorite, and she offers them to me religiously every morning.
I don’t look up, don’t meet her eyes, because then she’ll see that I’m on edge. Petrified, to be honest. That’s because the dead body might still be out there, on the empty road along the fairgrounds.
And I just can’t stand it anymore.
I need to drive by the fairgrounds and check again.