Stepping into that house was like stepping into a television set from the 1970s, complete with wallpaper and shag carpeting and the widespread use of brown. It was hard to pin down the exact smell that assaulted my nostrils as we walked through a dark hallway—not pets exactly, not cigarettes only. The walls had a dingy, yellowish quality; if I bumped my shoulder against any wall, I might come away smudged. As we followed my grandmother—my grandmother!—through the house, it occurred to me that this was what life would smell like if nothing was ever washed and if no window was ever opened to let in a bit of fresh air.
“Would you like something to drink?” my grandmother asked as we came into the den.
Mom and I glanced around, taking in the bare walls, the ancient television console, a sagging plaid couch.
“No—thank you, though. I’m so sorry to barge in on you like this, and so late at night.” Mom’s smile was uncertain. Her eyes kept flitting around to the corners of the room, as if worried that something evil was lurking in a dark recess.
My grandmother settled her cushiony weight onto the couch, which sighed in mild protest. Mom was right, I realized—it was hard for my mind to form the phrase my grandmother, let alone the word Grandma. But what else could I call her—Mrs. Kaufman? If I’d passed her on the street, I wouldn’t have thought she was any relation of mine. Her face was broad, her features somewhat hidden by folds of extra skin and a thinning perm that framed her face like dandelion fluff. She stared at me vacantly. If I didn’t know better—and I didn’t—I would say my grandmother was pleasantly stoned.
“You look like your father,” she said, and I realized that while I was scrutinizing her, she’d been scrutinizing me, too. I was worried that I was making a bad impression for a first-meeting-of-the-grandmother. Never in my life had I felt so out of place for wearing all black. In this house, the land that time forgot, there was no such thing as a pair of skinny jeans, and combat boots were to be worn only in actual combat.
“I do?” I blurted. I’d honestly never been told this. It was Daniel who looked more like Dad, or really, like a blend of Mom and Dad, if you took their very best qualities and melded them together. Once Daniel had told me that I fell off a truck at the farmer’s market and had been rescued by my well-meaning “parents.” He’d apologized for it later, but when I looked at myself next to the rest of my family, it had made a sort of sense.
My grandmother nodded and continued, “Yes, when he was a boy.”
Oh. This was either a strange compliment or an outright insult. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, not even something witty or ironic or at least marginally funny, so I settled for, “I’m Olivia.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Olivia.” Her smile was empty, the action of a robot programmed to give automatic responses.
Mom shot me a look that said, Shut up and let me do the talking. She cut right to the point. “We’re looking for Curtis.”
“Well, you just missed him. He left a few hours ago.”
“He was here?” I blurted again, like the kid in class who wasn’t paying attention and needed everything repeated. Yes, I was that kid. But I had to hand it to Mom. I’d figured we were on the wild-goose chase to end all wild-goose chases, and she’d been right all along. It turned out I did have a secret set of grandparents, and it turned out that my father had indeed come to visit them.
“Yes.” For the first time, a real emotion—surprise, puzzlement—passed across my grandmother’s face. “He was here earlier, to bring me to the hospital.”
“To bring you to the...?”
Mom looked at me again, and I let the rest of my question drift away, although this took a tremendous effort on my part.
“Well, I thought you would know, because I sent the letter. My husband has been in the hospital, and Curtis took me to see him.”
Mom absorbed this information silently, although it must have made about zero sense to her, too. What letter? What was he in the hospital for?
“I did think it was strange that he came alone,” my grandmother said. It sounded like an insult to me, but Mom let it pass.
“We’re supposed to meet up with him,” Mom explained. “But somewhere along the way, our plans got mixed up. Did he say he was staying in town tonight?”
My grandmother looked back and forth between the two of us, her gaze suddenly more focused. I tried to keep my face as neutral as possible, although I felt like screaming. It was bad that Dad had dumped me in Omaha, and it was bad that he had come here, but it was much, much worse that he hadn’t stayed here. There was a long pause while my grandmother considered us, as if we might not be family at all, but some kind of secret agents or saboteurs who were out to destroy her son.
Mom said, “Please, Lorene,” her voice tender, as if she were talking to a small child.
Lorene Kaufman, I repeated to myself, trying to give the words meaning. My grandmother.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “He said he had to go, and he hugged me real tight.”
Mom swallowed. “But he didn’t say anything in particular...?”
It looked like there was nothing else for us to learn, and Lorene Kaufman was ready to usher us back into the Chicago night, but still we waited. I glanced at a clock on the wall, the hands marking time behind a plate of cracked glass. Finally my grandmother said, as if she were just remembering, “He said there was something he had to do.”
“Something he had to do,” Mom echoed.
My grandmother nodded and pushed herself to a standing position, a hand on the armrest of the couch for support. There was no mistaking the message: We’re done here.