Marla & Gottfried’s Easter Dinner, Take Two

84 Days since the Snowstorm—April 1, 2018

Marla is hiding plastic neon-colored Easter eggs in the front flower bed. Gottfried is hacking at a patch of onion grass with a trowel four feet behind her. He stops to watch two spring robins chirp from a limb.

“Do you think these are too hidden?” Marla asks.

Gottfried goes back to his onion grass. “They’ll find ’em.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“They always find ’em.”

Gottfried looks back at the robins. He thinks of his five grandchildren. Four now. Only four left and he’s only ever met three. They say outliving your children is the hardest thing but Gottfried isn’t sure. What if they’re still living but they don’t want to talk to you? Gottfried wants to scream, but he doesn’t know who to scream at. It’s got to be someone else’s fault, these missing grandchildren, this collection of grown children who never come around. His son Matt hasn’t talked to them since the day he called to tell them about what happened.

Gottfried knows that he’s opened his phone contact list at least fifty times since and stared at Matt’s number but never pressed the call button. What do you say to your kid when he’s in a situation like that? When you’re not close to begin with? Sorry about your missing daughter?

“I’m going to the side, now,” Marla says. She adjusts her gardening apron and watches Gottfried looking at the robins. “You’ll have to get the ham on soon.”

“Ham,” Gottfried says. “Gotcha.”

Marla shakes her head. She wonders sometimes whether Gottfried ever really loved her. She knows she got colder over the years, but these are the most important times. He drove her to the hospital two weeks ago when she fell. He’s there if she needs a foot rub. That’s about it. Always seems inside his own head.

Gottfried pictures five robins.

When Matt called, he didn’t have any news. Missing is all there is. The kid is missing. Her birthday was a few weeks ago. Gottfried always remembers it. He didn’t send a card this year. He wouldn’t know where to send it. Missing. Worse than dead—Marla said that once. Gottfried’s imagination runs away with him sometimes and he doesn’t like what it shows him. Poor girl. She could be anywhere. Or, she could have run away. That’s what the police said. That’s what Gottfried likes to believe. She ran off with some boy. They’re probably having fun in Las Vegas or something. But it doesn’t stop him from crying sometimes.

Gottfried never believed in the resurrection. Marla’s insistence on the perfect Easter egg hunt since the kids were little annoyed him. Her obsession with it now that there were grandchildren was infuriating, especially considering their grandchildren were mostly grown—teenagers. Especially considering one of them is missing and the three he knows may not show up. In his anger, Gottfried finally finds the word he’s been searching for since the night he and Marla got home from the hospital. Complicit. That’s the word. It was his thumbs that couldn’t dial Matt’s number. His mouth that told Marla about giving money to Missy ten years ago. It was his brain that made all those decisions.

She says, “And don’t forget to peel the potatoes!”

He throws the lumps of onion grass into the woods that surround the house.

He goes inside and washes his hands.

He puts the ham in the roaster.

He empties a five-pound bag of potatoes in the sink and retrieves the peeler from the drawer. As he slices the skin off inch by inch, he thinks of his family again and cries.