We Could

 

“IT WAS THE day of Grandma Sissy’s memorial, two weeks after she had died. They had held it as an open house at the bakery, and all of them—Mom, Dad, Odette, Rex, Bea, Gary, everyone—had baked for three days in preparation.

They made Grandma Sissy’s favorites, cupcakes and individual chocolate cream pies, and they made her signature breads, mixed fruit popovers, bread pudding, and cookies, cookies, cookies.

They baked so that they would have enough to feed every resident of Eastsound Village and all of Grandma Sissy’s friends from the mainland who would be coming to the memorial, and then they baked even more because it seemed like something Grandma Sissy would want them to do—to sift and roll and fold and pound and bake.

They baked and they served and they cleaned up after. Never had Odette seen the bakery so full. People kept coming up and introducing themselves—“You must be Sissy’s granddaughter. You look just like her. You bake like her too!” and “Your grandmother was such a fine woman. Such a fine, grand woman.” Gary sniffed and wiped his eyes with a blue gingham pocket square. Bea claimed that crying was for tragedies and this wasn’t a tragedy, it was a blessing. Over and over everyone said how much they loved Grandma Sissy, and how they would help out any way they could.

Now, at last, the crowd had gone away and all that was left was flour caked under fingernails, stomachaches from too many sweets, and each other.

They flopped in Grandma Sissy’s living room, Mom on the chair and Odette with Rex and Dad on the sofa. Rex wore Paul in his ferret pouch around his neck. It had turned out that Paul liked bacon quite a lot, and that he was amenable to learning tricks to earn it. He was, however, developing a tiny potbelly under his fur. Georgie, exhausted from cleaning up cookie scraps, lay at their feet. When after a long time of quiet Mom finally spoke, Georgie’s ears perked up into two little points and she tilted her head as if she was listening.

“We could stay,” Mom said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

No one answered. The most important word in that sentence, Odette thought, wasn’t “stay.” It was “we.” As in, all of them. Together.

“There are schools on the island,” Mom went on. “And Grandma Sissy left the bakery to me. We could stay.”

“Stay here?” said Rex, the first to respond. “On the island? We could run the bakery?”

Mom nodded.

Rex looked surprised, but Odette wasn’t. It made sense: Mom was Grandma Sissy’s only child.

“Would Gary still help? And Bea? Would they be our friends?” Rex asked.

“I think they already are our friends,” Mom said, smiling. “But yes, they have offered to help out as long as necessary—teaching us about ordering and billing and more recipes.”

“What about the Coach?” Odette asked.

Mom looked at Dad. His head lolled against the back of the couch and his feet rested on the coffee table. As the official dishwasher, he’d worked hard all day. “We’d sell it,” he answered without opening his eyes.

We. He’d said “we” too.

Odette imagined what it might be like, to stay here on Orcas Island. She imagined riding her bike up Main Street with a group of kids. She pictured herself behind the counter of the bakery on the weekends. She imagined decorating a bedroom in Grandma Sissy’s house, making it her own. Never climbing into the wretched Coach again. Not living on the road. No more wheels beneath her bed.

But if they stayed here, it wasn’t as if everything would magically become the same as it used to be. Their problems wouldn’t go away, not on their own.

“Could we buy kayaks with the money from the Coach?” Rex asked.

“Maybe,” said Mom. And, to Odette, “But more than anything else, we want to hear from you. From both of you.”

“We get to decide?” asked Rex. “Me and Odette?”

“We all get to decide,” said Mom. She caught Odette’s eye and smiled. “We’ll take a vote. We know how rough this has been.”

That was an understatement. Selling their home. Saying goodbye. Living in the cramped, ugly Coach. The tire blowout. Searching for Paul in the rain. The fight with Mieko. Losing the phone. Grandma Sissy dying. All of it had been terrible.

But.

“I don’t know,” Odette said, slowly.

Dad opened his eyes. His eyebrows rose to make crinkles in his forehead. “You don’t want to stay?”

Part of her wanted to stay. Part of her wished they had never come in the first place. But if they hadn’t, then they wouldn’t have been here, with Grandma Sissy, at the end of her life. Witnessing her death had been terrible. But it had been better than not being there. Than not having kissed her goodbye.

Odette looked around at the pictures on the walls, the comfortably worn furniture, the wide, bright windows.

Outside and down the block waited the Coach. As tight and cramped as it was, it had kept the four of them—plus pets—warm and dry.

Far behind them, and long ago, was the house they had left behind.

“Grandma Sissy used to say that a beginning and an ending are two sides of the same door,” Odette said.

“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” asked Rex.

“Maybe it means that on the other side of something sad is something happy,” Dad said.

“Maybe it means that you can’t see what’s ahead of you if you’re focused on what’s behind you,” Mom said.

Odette said, “I think it means that beginnings can’t happen without endings. They’re stuck together. They’re connected.”

“Well,” Rex said, “she should have told us what she meant.”

That made everybody laugh. Even Georgie barked sharp and loud like an exclamation point.

Right then, with doors ahead of them and behind them too, there they were. Together. And happy, even though there were plenty of good reasons not to be. That’s life, as Grandma Sissy said. The good and the bad, all mixed up together.

They had come a long way from home. But Odette didn’t feel homesick anymore.