When Heather comes back from lunch, I excuse myself for the day, stating that I don't feel well. She's in such a good mood she doesn’t complain, and that makes me feel worse. I want to text LD, but I don't know what to say. How terrible was I in hoping Heather would reject Micah? What kind of friend does that? And what kind of friend am I to hate that it didn’t happen?
I walk straight home, to the small blue vinyl house I’ve lived in my entire life. The white porch needs painting, and the swing’s chains are rusted, but it’s home. Just seeing it makes me feel a little better. I rush up the steps and go inside.
“Grams, what do you want for dinner?” I call into the house, rolling up my shirtsleeves as I make my way into the kitchen.
Grams doesn’t answer me.
“Yoo-hoo?” I call again, and open the refrigerator to see what I can cook. There’s milk, eggs, lunch meat, and my three-day-old vomit-inducing attempt at making curry. I sigh. “Is pizza okay with you? I’m starving but I’m too lazy to do the dishes. Unless you did them. Did you do them . . . ? Grams . . . ?”
Still, no answer.
“Grams . . . ?” Closing the refrigerator door, I grab the phone to order a pizza from Steady Pizza (seriously, that’s the name). “You like pepperoni, right? Or is that just me?”
When Grams still doesn’t answer, I figure she must be in the back room sleeping, but I go to check anyway.
The door to the back room is open, and the light is on. I breathe out a sigh of relief, and knock on the door.
“If you’re sleeping again, or ignoring me because you found that thong that I definitely don’t own . . .”
Grams looks up from a photo album in her lap. She’s sitting on the guest bed—what used to be Mom’s room before she up and left. “Oh, darling, I didn’t hear you. How was work today?”
“Stupid as always,” I reply, sitting down beside her. I look down at the old photo album. The pictures are yellowing and curled at the edges, most of them with some variation of a young woman who looks like Grams and a tall and handsome young man in an air force uniform. Grandpa. It’s really quite spectacular how they met. She was a farmer’s girl from Hemingway, South Carolina, whose best friend cajoled her into going to the air show a few hours away. She didn’t—doesn’t—care about airplanes. She hates to fly. But she went anyway, and she watched the airmen do all these crazy inverted loops and then went out for drinks with her friend. Her ears were ringing. She was tired. She wanted to go home.
But then a man came up to her at the bar. He asked her for her name. Then he outstretched his hand for a dance, and despite the fact that she hated flying and airplanes and things that did three-hundred-sixty-degree loops, she fell in love with a fighter pilot.
She takes out one of the photos with her weathered fingers like it’s a thin piece of glass and hands it to me.
“I like that one the best,” she says, and her eyes glitter with adoration. Grandpa is striking a Samuel Adams pose, one leg hiked up on a keg, grinning the hell out of the picture. He’s on the edge of a cliff against the backdrop of which is China. He and Grams traveled when they were young. Wherever the air force stationed him, she went, and even after he got out of the military they traveled. There are so many knickknacks and trinkets from so many different times and places, I can’t keep track of where the hell everything’s from. When Grams got pregnant with my mom, though, they settled down in Grandpa’s hometown, and built this house. They were here to see the construction of the radio tower, the paving of Main Street, and everything else that came and went in Steadfast.
I take the picture, smoothing out the curling edges. “Looks like you guys partied hard.”
She throws her head back in a willowy laugh. I love her laughs. “That was in China. We camped out on the ledge that night . . . you could see Beijing just over those hills . . .” Then she bends in closer and adds, “That was the night your mother was conceived.”
I drop the picture like it’s hot coals. “Grams! I didn’t need to know that.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, darling! Everyone needs to know where they’re from.”
“Except for me.” I pick the photo up off the ground and hand it back to her. I lean my cheek against her shoulder. She’s been so many places over her life, left her trail across the world like a connect-the-dots game. Grams is from everywhere, made up of all the places she’s been. And I am made up of Steadfast. Of her. “I love you. You’re my home.”
She wraps her arm around me in a side hug, and kisses my forehead, like she always did when I was little and alone. I was alone a lot before Micah, Billie, and LD. It was just me and her. That was something Heather would never understand—what it’s like to be abandoned. Everyone loves her.
Including Micah now.
“Oh, darling, I love you, too.”
We sit there for a long moment, and then she kisses my forehead one more time and sits up straight. She pats my knee. “Darling! So, how was work today?”
I strain a smile over my lips, and this time I say in earnest, “It sucked.”