The Queen of Everything (22 page)

Grandma gave me one of her nightgowns. Actually
it was more like a floral housecoat. If Melissa could have seen me, she'd have
laughed like crazy. All I needed was a hair net with rollers

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underneath. But nothing was truly very humorous
right then. Because there in the darkening house with Grandma asleep in the
other room and the sound of the kitchen clock ticking, ticking, the idea of
Grandpa being gone was catching up to me. There is nothing quite so empty
sounding as a clock ticking in a house that is not your own. I was trying hard
not to cry. I felt scared. I got a sheet and blanket from the linen closet and
made myself a bed on the couch. The linens smelled the way everything in their
house smelled, like vegetables cooked until they were pale.

I lay down very still. Set my cheek on one of
the couch's rough, needlepoint pillows. I could hear Grandma rustling about in
the other room. I tried to sleep, but it was hard. It felt like Grandpa was
everywhere. He was more present while gone than when he sat right on that same
couch next to me watching baseball. I wondered if he was still hovering about,
he felt so close; floating all around like those tiny specks of dust you can see
only when the light is right. I kept hearing his voice when I shut my eyes, like
he was giving me a big dose of himself before he left for good. A few moments
later, I heard Grandma call out.

"Honey?"

Her voice gave me a start. I was feeling
responsible for her, and I guess down deep I was

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a little nervous something might happen to her
on my shift. That dying business makes you edgy.

"What, Grandma?"

"Would you mind coming here?"

She was propped up against both pillows. She
looked small in her bed. Her hair frizzed out all white and wiry from her head.
"Do you need something?" I asked.

"No," she said quietly. "Yes."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm just..." she said. "I'm very alone." Her
voice was small. "I keep trying to tell myself he only went to take out the
garbage. So I can sleep."

"But that's not working, huh?" I
said.

"Garbage day is Friday," she said. She started
weeping softly.

"Do you want me to come in for a while?" I
asked.

I saw her white head bob in the darkness. I
went back to the couch, got my blanket, and lay down on the bed beside her.
"You're gonna have to share a pillow, though," I said. She slipped a pillow from
behind her head and handed it to me. I propped it under my head. I thought about
Grandpa's body, lying there in my place. I just kept wondering where he
was.

"I don't know if I can sleep without his
snoring," she said. "I hated that snoring."

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"I'll snore for you," I said. I gave a couple
of loud snorts.

"Oh, honey." She laughed. She patted her lap,
and I inched closer to her, laid my head down on her thin legs. "Sometimes it
would make me bolt upright in the night.
The train is here, and I haven't
even packed!"

She raked her hand through my hair, the way she
used to when I was small. I tried not to, but I couldn't help it. I started to
cry too. Darkness does this. It finds all the places you are hiding in. It finds
all the things you are holding onto tightly and makes you let go.

"I knew something was going to happen," Grandma
said. "I felt it coming. Since Marty Abare bought the station, I felt it." Her
soft, knobby fingers brushed against my temple. "He was just sitting there.
Sitting there right in his chair, plain as day. Eating a bowl of ice cream.
Scraping the spoon against the bottom of the bowl in that irritating fashion he
has. 'Eugene, must you?' I would say. I tried to get him to come to bed. You
know how upset he was. Oh, he was angry. But Eugene never did anything he didn't
want to."

"No," I said.

"He just looked at me," she said. '"What the
hell did they put in this soup?' he said. Those very words. Soup! Then down went
his head. Drop. Right to his chest. It was the oddest thing.

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Sixty years, I've known him, and his head just
went down like that and he was gone," she said in wonder. "In a way I wish he'd
have lingered. Just ... waited a moment. But Grandpa wasn't the type to do
anything halfway, now, was he? All or nothing. Still ..." She breathed a shaky
breath. "I would have liked to say good-bye."

I cried at that for a while. "It was me," I
said into the blanket. "It was my fault." It was good to get those words out,
that blackness. "I didn't think it would make him so upset."

"Oh no, Jordan, no."

"Marty Abare ... and what I told him. I'm so,
so sorry Grandma," I cried into the blanket. "I didn't mean to hurt
him."

"No, no," she said. "Jordan, no. It wasn't your
fault. No, sweetheart. Nothing did him in."

I was glad she said it, but I didn't believe
her. That I would never believe. She started to cry softly then too. I just lay
there real still until she stopped. For a while, she was so still, I thought she
was asleep. But she'd only been sitting there, thinking.

Finally she spoke. "They zipped him into this
plastic bag," she said. "Like those pieces of luggage you put your good suits
in? A garment bag. With the little opening for hangers on top."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"The two boys that came, they asked if I wanted
to leave the room, but I said no. I was

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interested. Eugene hadn't let me watch when my
mother died. He made me go into the kitchen and turn on the radio! And my
father, well, he'd been in the hospital, and they do all the shushing off when
no one is around. Seeing it, well, for a moment, I did panic. My heart pounded.
I worried he wouldn't be able to breathe in there."

"That's probably why they didn't want you to
look."

She thought some more. "It was burgundy," she
said finally. "That bag. A nice shade of burgundy. I've always thought a little
color can make things more bearable."

"Me too," I said.

"And then there he went," she said. "Right in
his pajamas. Now I suppose they'll be required to give them back so I don't
sue."

I didn't say anything. I pictured someone
saluting and clipping their heels together, handing back the pajamas folded into
a triangle.

"I don't want them back," she said.

"I wouldn't," I said.

"I asked the boys for a receipt. Before they
carried him off. You should have seen the look! They were laughing at me, with
their eyes, I could tell. The one even caught the glance of the medic, who only
shrugged, like he'd seen worse. They didn't think I noticed, but I most
certainly did. I was a teacher for twenty-five

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years, don't forget. Not much slips past me.
But that was perfectly fine, they could laugh to their heart's content. Go right
ahead. I held firm. I made them write one on the back of an
envelope."

I smiled in the darkness. "Eugene would have
been proud. Eugene told me to always get a receipt."

Somebody tell me why we look at dead people in
their caskets, on purpose. My father says that it helps make it more real,
death. Well, it sure does drive the point home, doesn't it? If you need the
point driven home by then. But, hey, we don't have to watch ourselves get
surgery to face the fact of being sick, do we? Or stand barefoot in the snow to
understand winter is coming? I seriously doubt you turn thirty-five and suddenly
start accepting this logic. If you ask me, people are just afraid to say what a
stupid idea this is. No one wants to look like a chicken.

And the thing is, it's not like it's only a
quick peek either. No, they put goddamn benches in those places so you have to
sit and look at that chalky profile until you are convinced you see the chest
going up and down. Until you see those folded hands rise up in a little wave.
Until the last thing on your mind is how much you loved that fake person in
there. Instead you start wondering if it's true what they say about
those

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funeral guys putting toothpicks in the eyes so
they don't pop open and surprise someone. And you start wondering about those
funeral guys themselves. Walking around in their dark suits with faces like
those palace guards in London. You just want to walk right up to them and sing
"Beans, Beans the Magical Fruit" just to see if they're really human.

One thing I knew, that fake guy up there had
nothing to do with Grandpa Eugene, and he'd have been the first to tell people
he wasn't about to do no goddamn tap dance, so what the hell were they looking
at? Most of the people there had done this kind of thing before and seemed to
disagree with me. They sat on the benches, whispering back and forth as if
waiting for the matinee to start. My father wandered around up front, rattling
the change in his pocket. I wished he'd stop it, because although I was sure it
was only nerves, it made him look in a hurry to leave. Some people got up and
stood there beside Grandpa Eugene or patted his hand, which gave me the creeps.
That body up there is what Grandpa Eugene would look like if they made a copy of
him for a wax museum. It was not him, the man who wiggled his old ass
around.

"He looks really good," the woman behind me
whispered. She said she was related to me somehow, but I was having a hard time
keeping

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it all straight. I had never seen her before in
my life. For all I knew she could have been there for the ham sandwiches
later.

"Oh, he does, he does," her companion whispered
back. "He looks wonderful." This I did not understand. Sure he looked like he'd
just had a clean shave and his hair was in a perfect Elvis confection, but he
did not look great. He looked dead. Dead people look amazingly dead.

"My Humbolt," Miss Poe piped in. She had come
along with Mom, Nathan, and the gang, and had latched herself to the two suspect
relatives. "What a mess they made of him. He looked terrible. Not even a bit
like himself. He looked like Winston Churchill."

"I'm sure you were the only one who thought
so," the suspect relative said. Kindly, I thought.

"Well, look who's here," she said.

"Who?" Miss Poe said. I was worried about Miss
Poe getting too cozy with those two. I wondered where Mom had gone, but I didn't
want to get up and walk around to find out. I was worried that I might
accidentally see something else I didn't want to see in that place.

"Nancy. Sonia's cousin's wife," the suspect
relative said. I looked toward the doorway where a couple was entering. "She
just had her breasts enlarged, not that you can tell by looking at them. That
kind of surgery at her age. Might

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as well flush your money right down the toilet
if you ask me." Not so kind after all. The suspect relative had a mean
streak.

"I say if it makes you feel better about
yourself, go for it," the companion said. That
All right! Power salute!
in her voice.

"You obviously haven't read any of those
articles," the suspect relative said testily.

"Well, either way, they certainly are a nice
pair of whoppers now," Miss Poe said.

I hoped Grandpa was still hovering around. He
would have liked that. If anyone could have used a laugh right then, it was
Grandpa.

Mom appeared. I scooted to make room for her.
She sat down next to me and took my hand. She was nicely covered today, in a
loose green dress. Black was for dead presidents, maybe, she'd said. But not for
Eugene.

"How are you managing?" She squeezed my
hand.

"This is weird," I said.

"I know," she said. "For me too, and I've done
this before." She watched the front of the room for a moment. "Jordan, your dad
..."

"What?" I said.

"Is he all right? He doesn't look well. He
looks like hell, actually."

"His father just died. How do you expect him to
look?"

"Not just that. I haven't seen him in a
while."

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She followed his movements with her eyes. "He's
so thin. I thought maybe he'd been... sick or something."

Not there. Not then. "He looks the same to
me."

"Okay, okay," she said. "I care about him is
all. And you. You know that." Her voice cracked. I tried not to look at
Grandpa.

"I know."

The church service was held at St. Anne's, a
few blocks from Eugene's Gas and Garage. I had to walk with Grandma and Dad and
the rest of the family behind the casket as it went down the church aisle. It
made my throat close up, seeing Mom and Nathan and Hugh in their seats, looking
over their shoulders at me, and even Bonnie Randall, sitting in the back, and
Laylani and Buddy, which was nice. And that ass-wipe Marty Abare with his
crocodile eyes and his wife, Charlotte, which would give Grandpa something to
complain about. Now that Grandpa was covered up and less distracting, the ritual
seemed more real and I fought back tears. Grandpa's casket looked very alone up
there. Making the trip ahead of us.