2

Okay, so I warned you about the sad part. I have to tell you about it because if Grams hadn’t died, then my super miraculous journey would never have happened

When I got home, I admit I wasn’t in the best of moods. I think it’s understandable though—I was facing the summer with no plans and no friends. As I turned the corner to my house, I saw Eileen walking Lady Gaga. When I say walking, I mean waiting with a plastic bag on her hand while Lady Gaga did her duty on the pavement. I tried to step around her, but she had this weird look on her face—Eileen, not Lady Gaga.

She tilted her head to the side and said, “You poor lamb. Now, when you’re feeling strong enough you come and see me, and I’ll sort out that funny haircut of yours.”

I didn’t know Eileen that well and I couldn’t understand why she was suddenly so worried about my hair situation.

Then she dabbed her nose with a tissue and said, “I’m sorry, Fred, it was her time.”

I looked at Lady Gaga and shrugged. If you gotta go, you gotta go.

Obviously now I realize Eileen wasn’t talking about Lady Gaga taking a dump outside Mr. Burnley’s house, but at the time I didn’t think any more about it because a surprising sight had caught my eye.

That surprising sight was my dad.

He was standing at the back gate.

This was a surprising sight for two reasons.

Number one: he hadn’t left the couch since his accident.

Number two: he was smoking!

I was outraged. I wasn’t going to stand by while he slowly killed himself, so I shouted, “Dad! What are you doing?”

I could tell I’d surprised him because he almost toppled over. I stormed up to our house, anger fueling my legs, and immediately launched into the presentation I gave in fifth-year science on the dangers of smoking. “Dad, there are more than 5,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke—”

“You’re not going to list all 5,000 now, are you, Fred?” he said in this tired-sounding voice, which I thought was a bit rude when I was trying to save his life. One dead parent is enough.

“At least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia. And among the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least sixty-nine can cause cancer.”

I could NOT believe it when he took another puff of his cigarette. I watched the smoke billowing out of his nostrils and I thought I was going to explode like the bottle of Coke at the class party.

He must have got the picture because he said, “Sorry, Fred,” and dropped the butt on the ground and crushed it with his good foot.

“Why were you smoking?”

“It’s your Grams.”

This confused me, so I said, “Grams doesn’t smoke. And, frankly, it’s a bit of a low move to try and claim the cigarette you were smoking was hers.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“What do you mean then?”

“She’s gone.”

I didn’t know what any of this had to do with my dad’s sudden nicotine habit. “Have you tried Mr. Burnley’s?” I asked, because last time we couldn’t find Grams she was there drinking sherry and playing strip-Monopoly. Well, she wasn’t actually playing strip-Monopoly but she’d taken off her cardigan, so Dad and I teased her about it for weeks. But when she threatened to stop washing our underwear and baking us cakes we stopped.

“She’s not at Mr. Burnley’s, Fred,” Dad said, shaking his head slowly. “She’s gone gone.”

“Gone gone?” My mind began whirling and I did not like the places it was going to.

“Dead, Fred. Your Grams is dead.”

Just like that. That’s how he said it.

I don’t know why, but I laughed. Not a ha-ha-funny laugh, but a ha-ha-my-brain’s-short-circuiting-and-I-have-no-control-over-my-emotions-right-now kind of laugh.

I don’t know how much of what I said next Dad understood because my chin had started wobbling uncontrollably. What I wanted to say was, “How can she be dead? You said she’d outlast us all.” But I think it sounded like, “Howeee. Dead. Dead. All, lastus!”

Dad sort of crumpled over the gate and said, “I’m sorry, Fred.”

“Sorry? Why are you sorry? Did you kill her?” Obviously I didn’t think he’d killed her—I was experiencing some sort of emotional breakdown.

“What? No!” Understandably Dad looked a little taken aback.

My throat started doing this contracting thing and I had to keep swallowing hard so I could breathe. “Well, what happened then? She was fine when I left this morning.”

“She was old, Fred. It was her time.” (This was when I realized Eileen had not been talking about Lady Gaga.)

Dad reached one arm out toward me, but I took a step back. I couldn’t help it. I was really, really angry and, in that moment, he was the only person I could blame.

I yelled at him. “She’s always been old, but she’s never died before! How could you let this happen?” I marched past him and into the house. I could hear his crutches clattering behind me.

He started shouting things like, “Stop! Fred—wait. Let’s talk about this.”

But I didn’t stop or wait because I didn’t want to hear any more words. I threw my school bag down in the hallway and stormed into the kitchen. There was this almighty crash as he tripped over my bag. I know it’s wrong but a teeny part of me wanted him to have hurt himself—just a little bit—to get him back for telling me about Grams.

He wasn’t hurt but he was angry. A barrage of unrepeatable words tumbled out of his mouth. Some of them I had heard before. Others—like “dunderbod”—I think he made up on the spot. It was a good job Grams was dead, because if she had heard him he’d have been in so much trouble.

“Fred! What have I told you about your school bag? Get in here now.”

For a split second I considered making a run for it, but my conscience got the better of me. I walked back into the hallway at the exact moment he hurled my backpack out of the back door.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “There was a Capri Sun in the big pocket. It’s probably burst all over my school report.”

Dad didn’t seem to care about that. He still looked really angry. He tried to get up, but he was a tangled mess of limbs and crutches. He swore again and launched one of his crutches and it flew out of the door and landed next to my bag. He raised his other crutch skyward, but I grabbed it before he could send it flying.

“Stop throwing stuff outside, would you?” And then I said something Grams would have said. “What would the neighbors think?”

It was then that his head dropped down and he started making this weird snorting noise, like a dying walrus. (Oooh, maybe not the best time, but I have a fact about walruses: they weigh a ton. That’s as much as a car. Most people don’t know that, they think they’re much smaller than they are—like otter-sized—but they’re massive.)

Dad wasn’t mimicking the snort of a dying walrus. He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before but then I’d never had a dead grandmother before. I didn’t know what to do so I stood there, holding on to his crutch, with my mouth open.

When eventually the snorting and sobbing had died down, he said, “Help your old man up, would you, Fred?”

I pulled him onto his good foot, then wedged myself under his armpit and maneuvered him back to the couch.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” I lifted his bad leg and placed it on the footstool. “I shouldn’t have left my bag there. I only did it because Grams is dead.”

He let out a really big sigh and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his sweater, which he is always telling me not to do. I was going to point it out, but it didn’t seem like the right moment. I’m just saying the double standard did not go unnoticed.

Dad then said, “No, I’m sorry, Fred. I didn’t do a very good job of breaking the news. I’ve been thinking about how to tell you all day and then . . . well I come out with ‘gone gone.’ ”

This was true, he hadn’t done a good job, but he looked so upset that I told him it was okay. I sat down next to him. I wasn’t angry anymore. Just sad.

“How did it happen?”

“One minute she was sitting in her chair knitting and shouting at talk show repeats on the TV. The next she was gone. A stroke, they reckon.” Dad looked over to Grams’s empty chair. I followed his gaze. I could still see the imprint of her bottom on the seat. Her knitting was draped over the arm. I walked over and picked up the unfinished sweater. There was a rainbow-colored dinosaur on the front. I held it up for Dad to see.

He pulled a face. “Another one of her masterpieces for her favorite grandson, no doubt.”

I don’t feel great saying this, but I can’t say I was sorry she hadn’t finished that one. I hadn’t been into dinosaurs for ages. I placed her knitting needles on the coffee table and we sat in silence, listening to the clock tick-tocking.

Around tick-tock number forty-six, Dad cleared his throat. “We’re going to be alright, son. No matter what, okay?”

I nodded, but as I looked at his leg in plaster from ankle to hip, I wasn’t convinced. The most senior person in the household was someone who had run himself over with his own mail truck.

We sat in front of the TV for the rest of the evening. Around nine o’clock I realized we hadn’t eaten. I wasn’t hungry, so I left Dad in the living room with a family-sized packet of onion rings and went to my bedroom to ponder. After some pondering, I headed to the bathroom, did my nighttime pee, brushed my teeth, did another little nighttime pee as I hadn’t got it all out the first time, and headed back to my bedroom.

But I didn’t end up there—I ended up in Grams’s room. I sat on her flowery comforter and breathed in the smell of her. Lavender and mint candies.

I sat there breathing and smelling and picturing her papery wrinkles and smiling face and my heart started to hurt. I slid open a drawer of her nightstand. I wanted something of hers to have with me when I went to sleep. I thought that way I might still feel close to her.

I rummaged around through a whole heap of lottery scratch cards. I found her reading glasses, her spare set of false teeth, and a few of her hair rollers. They weren’t what I had in mind as a memento, so I closed the drawer and opened the one below. Inside I spotted one of her handkerchiefs—it had little purple flowers stitched on it. I held it to my nose and as I inhaled I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, they were leaking.