|
||||
she stands an inch under five feet. Despite a French-Canadian ancestry with a bit of Indian blood, she claims Englishness. Grampie Marlowe, who emigrated from a London slum when he was eighteen, is deceased. "Thank God," she says, "he doesn't need to bear the pain anymore. It's all on me now." I don't remember my great-grandfather, but I know he built the house we live in and planted the lilacs that shot up around it. In the last photograph we have of him, his wasted body bundled in a deck chair, a faint smile of protest leaks down his chin. Grammie Marlowe, claiming illness of her own, had thought it best he spend his remaining month of life on the hospital porch rather than on his own. "How was Mamie's color?" she asks, pressing against the screen. 
|
"All right. She ate all the chocolates." "You should've made her save some. But then the nurses would've eaten --" At that moment a dark blue Chevrolet, dragging a tail of dust, pulls up at the curb. In an instant Grammie Marlowe disappears, but her voice sticks in specks of itself on the screen. "Tell him your mother's not home, d'you hear?" Grampie Nadel never leaves his car, so he had no idea who is in the house and who isn't. Still, he can always smell a lie, and usually I'm the one who has to tell it. Sitting patiently, his bald head almost pumpkin-size, he waits for someone to approach him. Grammie Marlowe won't allow him to step foot on the grass, much less inside the house. What is supposed to stay hushed has a way of being heard again and again, sometimes in  |
|||
