It would come as a shock to anyone, I guess, having a clown show up at your doorstep in the middle of dinner to sing to you about how your grandpa had passed away. Most people would inform their family with a phone call.
Then again, my grandfather wasn’t most people.
Even delivered by a clown, the news still struck me like a cannonball to the gut. I’d just seen Papa Kwirk less than four months ago, over Christmas break. He seemed healthy enough. No indication that he was about to “cash in his chips.” He still made fart jokes, told war stories that I was pretty sure weren’t appropriate, and cussed up a storm when my parents weren’t in the room. He still chewed black licorice by the pound, producing it from some bottomless inside pocket of his cracked leather bomber jacket. I suspect he chose licorice because he knew none of us liked it and he wouldn’t have to share, though it meant he always smelled like cough drops. My grandfather’s mediciney breath is usually the first thing that comes to mind when I think of him.
He and my great-aunt Gertrude had come to visit like they always did—their requisite four days over holiday break—riding down on Jack Nicholson’s back through the flittering snow. With Papa Kwirk’s bushy white beard and Aunt Gertie precariously perched behind him and the sidecar holding one suitcase and a trash bag full of wrapped packages, they looked like the Hell’s Angels version of Santa and Mrs. Claus. You could hear them coming from three blocks away, thanks to Jack’s obnoxious growl. Jack Nicholson was grandpa’s favorite actor, so naturally he had named his motorcycle after the man.
When he’d heard Jack’s rumbling this last time, my father looked at my mother and said, “Here we go again.”
“It’s only four days,” she said with a sympathetic look. Mom and Dad always got a little tense during the holidays. With Mom you could tell it was just the stress of having everything done in time: packages wrapped, tree trimmed, turkey stuffed, house spotless. With Dad, though, it seemed to be all about my grandfather. He tried not to show it, of course, but you could tell, and this last Christmas had been no different.
The moment they pulled into the driveway, Papa Kwirk started handing out our presents, insisting that we open them right there in the snowy front yard even though it was only Christmas Eve and twenty-eight degrees outside and my fingers were too stiff to undo the ribbon. Lyra got a calligraphy set. Cass got a creepy ventriloquist dummy that looked like it might come to life and murder me in my sleep. My package turned out to be a tactical combat knife with a hollow handle to store matches and fishing gear—“In case you ever find yourself stranded behind enemy lines,” Papa Kwirk said. Then he proceeded to explain how I could use the hook and fishing line to suture a shrapnel wound, complete with a graphic description of what a land mine does to a body (“blows your leg clean off”). The knife went right into the attic, next to the junior crossbow Grandpa had gotten me when I was eight. Mom said I could have them both when I graduated high school.
“Why not just let the boy have it?” my aunt Gertie protested. “It’s not like he’s going to stab anybody.”
As my great-aunt pleaded on my behalf, Papa Kwirk leaned down and whispered to me, “But if you have to, get ’em between the neck and the shoulder. They’ll go down quick and easy that way.” My grandfather was full of practical advice.
He also had a knack for gift giving, even the ones Mom didn’t confiscate until I was old enough to join the army myself. Slingshots and fireworks. Tie-dyed rabbits’ feet and shark’s-tooth necklaces and oversized beer steins that I was only allowed to drink caffeine-free soda out of. Poker chips and posters of old horror movies like The Thing and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. He once got me a chipmunk that he’d stuffed himself. A real-life dead chipmunk. Because he “knew I liked chipmunks” (I didn’t) and because “you’re never too young to start an interest in taxidermy” (also not true). That gift went into the trash after they left. I wasn’t sad to see it go.
That was the thing about Papa Kwirk, though—or at least one of the things, one of the many things: you never knew what was going to be in the box. The old man was full of surprises. Dad said I didn’t know the half of it—in a way that suggested I’d rather not know the other half.
But this last surprise—the one that came in the form of a clown on our front porch—topped them all.
I couldn’t recall Papa Kwirk ever being sick. Sure, a bag of black licorice every day couldn’t be good for your blood sugar. And then there was the ritual cigar. Every evening during his visit, my grandfather would go outside to smoke, making little clouds that cast his face in a circle of fog. In the morning he would cough half a lung into the sink, but I was used to hearing it, just like I was used to him guzzling six cups of coffee a day and opening glass bottles of soda with his teeth.
That couldn’t be enough to kill you, though. Not enough to kill him, at least. Papa Kwirk was tough. From the scars on his hands to the rough hide that covered his arms, he looked like he’d seen a century’s worth of living and would live to see a century more. Dad once told me that Papa Kwirk “lived hard,” which, I assume, was not quite the same as “having a hard life.” I figured “living hard” just meant smoking cigars and riding motorcycles and adding to your grandson’s arsenal every Christmas.
“He lived hard” was pretty much the most Dad ever said about his father. We didn’t talk about Papa Kwirk much when he wasn’t around, and he and Dad never said much to each other even during those Christmas visits. They hardly ever talked on the phone. When my grandpa called, which was rarely, he usually ended up talking to my mother, and even those conversations lasted less than five minutes: just long enough to relay a bit of news.
But he had still showed up on Christmas Eve, every year, for as long as I could remember. Licorice and cigars, cursing and coffee. Breath that could kill a chipmunk, and the skills to stuff it after. I just assumed it would always be so. That he’d ride in next Christmas, crush me in a bear hug, and tell stories about “dodging Bouncing Betty in the boonies” in Vietnam. He and my father would trade frowns for a few days, muttering more words under their breath than they would to each other. Then he’d ride away again, with my almost-as-crazy aunt Gertie straddling the back of Jack, waving goodbye. Because that’s how it’d always been.
Which explains why I was struck speechless, standing there in the April evening chill with a sucker in my hand, staring at a grumpy clown who had just told me that there would be no more war stories. No more fingers to pull. No more potentially lethal Christmas gifts. No more trips around the block in Jack Nicholson’s sidecar.
Because my father’s father was never coming back.
The first call was to Aunt Gertie. For confirmation. And, hopefully, some explanation.
Aunt Gertie was the only other living relative on my father’s side, at least the only one we were close to. Dad had some distant second cousins who lived out in Modesto who we always got a Christmas card from, but he just stuck it on the mantel next to the card from the family dentist. Aunt Gertie never had any kids of her own; she’d never even married. She claimed she couldn’t find a man who could keep up with her—which I can believe—though she went through several dozen trying. To hear Papa Kwirk tell it, Aunt Gertie had more boyfriends than “a queen bee in a hive full of drones.”
For a long time, Aunt Gertie lived out in New York City, lawyering, but then she retired from her practice and moved back to Illinois, into the same town as our grandpa, buying a house less than ten miles from the one where my own father grew up. Dad insists that she was the only person to ever move back to that town after leaving it.
Papa Kwirk and my great-aunt Gertie had been neighbors for the last decade or so, which seemed like a terrible idea to me. When I grew up, I was determined to live at least one country away from both of my sisters. Preferably with an ocean between us.
I stood right between them in the kitchen doorway, however, while Dad made the call with Mom behind him. We only got to hear half the conversation—Dad refused to put Aunt Gertie on speaker—but the half we heard told us most of what we needed to know.
“Hi, Gertie, it’s Fletcher. Listen, I called because . . . well . . . yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, he was just here. His name? Chuckles, I think. No, he didn’t have a squirting flower. Aunt Gertie, did Frank . . .” Dad’s voice quavered. The hand holding the phone started to tremble. Mom rubbed his back in slow, gentle circles.
Frank was Grandpa’s first name. Technically Francis, though I never heard anyone call him that. My father always called him Frank. We all called him Papa Kwirk, which he said he liked better because there were enough stinking grandpas in the world already—even though our name for him was, as Dad put it, “a little Smurfalicious.”
Aunt Gertrude called him Jimmy. It was a joke.
My grandfather’s middle name was Tyler, making his middle initial a T. At some point when they were teenagers, Great-Aunt Gertie started to tease her brother by calling him James. As in James T. Kwirk. Or when she was feeling especially ornery, Captain James T. Kwirk. It’s all right if you don’t get it. I didn’t at first either. It’s a Star Trek thing, apparently. But Aunt Gertie thought it was hilarious and kept at it. Over the years, James gradually switched to Jimmy, at least for Aunt Gertie, but my father still just called him Frank, which sounded just as weird to me. I couldn’t imagine calling my dad Fletcher. I couldn’t imagine calling him anything but Dad.
Of course I also spent more than four days out of the year with him.
Dad nodded solemnly as he listened to what Aunt Gertie had to say. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And when did this happen? What?” Dad’s cheeks flared. His voice rose. “And you didn’t think to tell me until just now? By singing telegram? What do you mean? Whose idea was it, then?” There was a significant pause. I tried to imagine Aunt Gertie on the other end, trying to explain. She‘d been a lawyer, after all; she could be persuasive when she wanted to be. “Oh. I see. Did he . . . you know . . . I mean, was it at least . . . peaceful? All right. Yes. No. I understand. You don’t need to tell me what my own father was like, Gertie. I get it. I just wish you’d called me as soon as it happened. We could have come down earlier. We could have done something. No. I don’t mean that. I understand. Well, yes, of course we will be there—he was my father. Yes, they’re all here. Yes, I’ll tell them. Yeah. Okay, let me call you back, all right? What? No, the clown didn’t do a dance. What does that even mean, the deluxe package? Then call the stupid telegram company and ask for your money back. Fine. Okay. Call you later.”
Dad hung up the phone and turned to look at the three of us wedged in the doorway, his face still pink as he let out a deep breath.
“That was Aunt Gertie,” he said, as if we’d just apparated there and had no idea what was going on. “Apparently your grandfather passed away yesterday morning. Sudden cardiac arrest.” He paused to let that bit sink in.
“Acute myocardial infarction,” Lyra said, which I guess was another name for sudden cardiac arrest, which was just a fancy way of saying heart attack. “Infarction” sounded . . . naughty, somehow. Which meant it sounded like something my grandfather would do. Right after you pulled his finger.
“The memorial service is on Sunday. In Greenburg, of course. Gertie’s already made all the arrangements, apparently.” Dad looked over at my mother and snorted one of those half-hearted snorts that are one percent laughter and ninety-nine percent can-you-even-believe-this.
“He passed away yesterday and she didn’t tell us?” Mom asked. “Why wouldn’t she call?”
“Apparently this was how he wanted it. The clown was Frank’s idea. Part of his last wishes, or something like that. I don’t know. I never pretended to understand the man.”
Dad looked like he might be ready to say something else, then he thought better of it, instead burying his chin into his chest, and then into my mother’s shoulder as she gathered him in. Cass crossed the kitchen floor and put an arm around them both. Lyra followed, wrapping hers around Dad’s waist, pressing her cheek to his back. It was a Kwirk family hug. I was the last to join, though I wasn’t quite sure how to insert myself into the tightly huddled mass, so I ended up just standing next to Mom, laying my head on her other shoulder, wondering if I was supposed to cry.
I took my cue from Dad and just closed my eyes instead.
The town of Greenburg, where my father grew up and where both my grandfather and great-aunt lived, wasn’t quite a four-hour drive. Which meant that we could have visited Papa Kwirk and Aunt Gertie pretty much whenever we wanted.
Except we almost never did. I could remember going there only twice—once for a week in the summer with my sisters while my parents celebrated their anniversary in Hawaii, and again when Papa Kwirk broke his leg Rollerblading. The doctor suggested Papa Kwirk take up a hobby more suited to a man of sixty years. He told the doc he was thinking of trying parkour.
Aunt Gertie often asked us to drive out for a visit, but whenever it was suggested, Dad had some excuse, citing his busy schedule at work or his philosophy that there were too many interesting places in the world to use precious vacation time on Greenburg, Illinois, a town he was much too familiar with already. I guessed there were other reasons; they just weren’t things Dad wanted to talk about. The same reasons why, every Christmas Eve, Dad would sit in the recliner, grinding his teeth, waiting for the sound of Papa Kwirk’s hog rumbling through the neighborhood.
Dad had no choice but to go back home this time, though, and we had no choice but to go with him.
The service was Sunday afternoon, so we could have planned to drive back that night, but Dad said I was probably still going to miss some school. “We might have to stick around a couple of days to get your grandfather’s things in order.” I wasn’t sure what all that entailed—going through Papa Kwirk’s stuff, rifling through his closets, cleaning out the garage, figuring out who got the leather jacket and the taxidermy kit. I imagined opening up his kitchen cabinets and seeing nothing but tubs of black licorice and cans of Folgers coffee.
Dad didn’t seem thrilled at the idea of a long stay. Neither was I. For one thing, I actually liked school. I didn’t like the learning, or the tests, or the homework, or the having to be quiet all the time, or how Simon Kazinski always kicked the back of my chair whenever he walked by. But I liked that school was not home. School felt normal. With normal kids complaining about normal problems and eating normal packed lunches, maybe with a piece of candy that didn’t taste like horseradish.
It helped that I went to Willow Creek Middle School, which meant that I was in a completely different building from either of my sisters. Lyra was lording her vocabulary over the other accelerated learners over at Willow Creek Elementary, and Cass was hanging out with all her artsy-fartsy drama club friends at Mayfield High, so I didn’t have to hear in the halls about how my one sister had made it to the finals of the county spelling bee or see posters of my other sister dressed as Cosette advertising the spring musical. For seven hours a day, five days a week, I could just be Rion, and I could choose to not correct anyone when they spelled my name the way any normal person would, with a Y and an A instead of an I and an O. I could just be the B-average kid who gets picked somewhere between fifth and eighth in basketball and doesn’t have to worry about his father suddenly stopping to taste tree bark or his sister suddenly belting out some showstopping number from Rent or his mother screaming and running from a bumblebee buzzing around the playground because she’s allergic to half the planet.
I mean, I understand that everybody’s family is a little odd. My friend Jackson has a brother who will only eat plain toast for breakfast—no butter or jelly, just plain toast. And Amanda, who sits next to me in class, has an uncle who was fired from his job for wearing a toga to work. He’d somehow gotten it into his head that he was the emperor of Rome. The difference was that her uncle had a diagnosable mental disorder, which was soon being treated with medication and therapy.
My family was simply weird. And they don’t make a pill for that.
My best friend, Manny, tells me that I’m overreacting. But Manny’s family doesn’t eat jelly beans for dinner or spend Tuesday evenings playing Shakespearian Scrabble, which is like normal Scrabble except you have to use “doth” and “thine” and “tis” instead of “does” and “your” and “its,” while your sister calls you a poisonous bunch-backed toad for stealing her triple word space and then swoons all over the carpet like you stabbed her in the heart. Manny thinks it sounds like fun, but he doesn’t have to live with it every day. His family eats at McDonald’s and plays Frisbee in the backyard. His father doesn’t own thirty bow ties or quiz him on the colors of the lions that made up Voltron. His mother doesn’t Clorox every doorknob in the house every day of the year and twice during flu season. At least I don’t think so. That’s why it was Manny I turned to when I needed a dose of normality.
Like the night of the singing clown.
I didn’t have my own phone yet—Mom was convinced too much screen time would stunt my imaginative growth—so I took the landline up to my room and shut the door. Manny picked up on the fourth ring.
“Get this,” I said, interrupting his hello. “Chuckles McLaughsalot just told me my grandpa’s dead.”
“Um . . . okay. I was about to tell you that I just watched a fish stick explode in the microwave, but yours is bigger. Are you serious? Your grandpa? The guy with the hog and the ferret?”
“The one and only,” I said.
Manny knew Papa Kwirk. He had ridden in Jack Nicholson before—only in the sidecar, of course, and just around the block like me. And he’d met the ferret too, the last time they’d come to visit. The ferret’s name was Beelzebub, and it was Papa Kwirk’s only pet. It liked socks, so much so that it tried to chew them right off your feet. Papa Kwirk would occasionally bring Beelzebub with him, somehow attaching the ferret’s carrier to the back of the bike behind Aunt Gertie. Dad’s frown only grew longer when he saw Grandpa pull up with that carrier in tow.
“Who the heck is Chuckles McLaughsalot?” Manny asked.
So I told him. About the clown, and the phone call to Aunt Gertie, and the heart attack. “A cute myocardinal infartshun,” I said, trying to sound as smart as Lyra.
“Huh. That really sucks. I’m sorry, Ri.”
Of course that’s what he had to say. That’s what everybody says when someone dies. But Manny sounded like he meant it, at least. “Thanks,” I replied, because I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to say when someone says they are sorry for your loss.
“He just had a heart attack? Just like that?”
“Yep. Just like that,” I repeated, though it sounded funny to me. Just a heart attack. I know that’s not what Manny meant—he meant that it came out of nowhere, all of a sudden—but the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t fit. I’d always imagined my grandfather going out in a blaze of glory. Maybe a skydiving accident gone awry. Or mauled to death while wrestling a bear in the woods. Or trying to jump over some canyon on the back of Jack Nicholson. Heart attack seemed a little too everyday for the likes of Captain James T. Kwirk.
“Man. Jeez. How is everybody else? The rest of your family, I mean?”
That was Manny for you, always thinking of others, but I suspected he mostly wanted to know about Cass. The past year or so, I’d caught him asking about her more and more, once even asking if she had a boyfriend yet, even though she’s four years older than him, and my sister, and therefor completely off-limits.
“Well . . . you know . . . they’re upset, obviously,” I replied.
But the truth was, I wasn’t sure how they were. After the phone call with Aunt Gertie, Mom stuck the untouched pasta in the fridge and then joined the others on the living-room couch. Lyra huddled close to Cass, who was steadily swiping away tears, neither of them saying anything. Dad sat on the end, making strange motions with his hands. He’d touch his fingers to his thumbs, like the first part of “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” except the rain never came down and the spider never got any higher; I’m not even sure he knew he was doing it. I sat in the chair and watched him, waiting for him to say something, but after ten solid minutes of near silence I grabbed the phone and ran upstairs. For all I knew they were all still sitting there.
“So you guys were, like . . . you know . . . close to him, then?”
Were we close to Papa Kwirk? We lived only four hours away. Four hours, and we still only saw him once a year. And even then, when we sat in the living room on Christmas morning, it was always the three Kwirk children on one side of the room, huddled around our parents by the tree, and Aunt Gertie and Papa Kwirk on the other side by the fireplace, almost as if my grandfather really was Santa and needed the chimney close by in case he wanted to make a quick exit. “Guess it depends on what you mean by close,” I said.
“Well, you know, my grandmother lives with me. Like, literally, she sleeps on my couch and leaves her dentures in a cup on the bathroom sink. Have you ever had to pee in the middle of the night and looked over to see your grandma’s teeth grinning at you? Only her teeth? It’s spooky, man. I mean, they kind of glow in the dark they’re so white. . . .”
He was trying to cheer me up. But it only made me wonder how different I would have felt if I had seen Papa Kwirk for more than four days out of the year. What would it have been like if he had actually lived with us? I don’t think my mother could have put up with the cigar smell for that long. I’m not sure I could have either.
And Dad would never have gone for it.
Manny was still going on about his grandma’s teeth when I heard a knock on my bedroom door. It startled me, and I nearly fell off my bed.
“I’ll call you back.”
I hung up, slid the rest of the way off the bed, and opened the door. Dad stood in the entry, still wearing his dress shirt and striped bow tie. One hand held a box of graham crackers. The other held a bottle of Gatorade. He still didn’t look like he’d cried at all.
“Just came to check on you,” he said. This wasn’t unusual. He was always coming upstairs to check on us, peeking in our doors as if to make sure we hadn’t disappeared or to see if we needed anything. This time, at least, he had a good reason.
“I’m fine,” I said automatically, then, realizing how terrible that sounded, added just as quickly, “I mean . . . I’m not fine, like, good fine, but I’m okay. I mean, I’ll be okay . . .” I stopped yammering and looked at his hands. “What’s with the Gatorade?”
Dad looked down as if he’d forgotten he’d been carrying anything. Then he smiled a half smile. “Oh. Right,” he said. “Milk and cookies.”
I gave him my “Really Dad?” look, the one I’d perfected over several thousand opportunities: part eyebrow arch, part eye roll.
“Okay, so we were out of cookies,” he admitted. “And I want to save the milk for breakfast tomorrow. So this was the best I could do. Red’s your favorite, right?” He held the Gatorade out to me.
I nodded. Red was my favorite. And I wasn’t opposed to the graham crackers either. After all, I’d had only one fried-chicken-flavored jelly bean for dinner.
“Mind if I come in?” Dad asked. I opened the door all the way, wondering if I should try to clear a path through the junk but then figuring on this, of all nights, it really didn’t matter. We sat together on opposite ends of my unmade bed and Dad tore open a sleeve of crackers, splitting the first one down the middle and giving me half. The cinnamon sugar flaked off on my fingers. He waited until my mouth was full before talking again. “I know it can be hard,” he began.
It. Losing someone, he meant. I chewed slowly, wondering why he said “can be” and not “is.” Didn’t he think it was hard? I grunted something close to “mm-hmm” and swallowed the lump lodged in my throat.
Dad turned his cracker over and over as if inspecting it for flaws. “I don’t think I ever told you, but when I was little, younger than you, and I’d get hurt or upset, your grandmother would bring milk and cookies to my door.”
My grandmother. Grandma Shelley. If there was anyone Dad talked about less than his father, it was his mom. She’d died when he was about my age, so of course I never got to know her, only what I could glean from the few memories Dad shared. That, and the glossy, glazed-over look Papa Kwirk would get in his eyes whenever he mentioned her, which was even less often than Dad did. I’d never heard anything about milk and cookies, though.
“She never came in, but I knew it was her. It was like this ritual. She’d knock three times, just like this . . .” Dad rapped his knuckles on my headboard. “And when I went to the door, they would be there, sitting on the floor, waiting for me. Like some milk-and-cookie fairy had paid me a visit. Always three cookies, and almost always Oreos. Sometimes I’d pretend to be hurt just so I could get them.”
“Smart,” I said, biting into a second cracker.
“Yeah,” Dad said, still fiddling with his first. “When you’re five, there’s nothing that can’t be cured with a Band-Aid and an Oreo.”
I could get behind that. When I was little, it was usually Mom applying the bandages, not because Dad wasn’t around, just because she had a ready supply. I don’t remember there ever being cookies, though; our house was always full of free candy already.
Come to think of it, this marked the first time I’d ever eaten in bed. Thou Shalt Not Have Food in Thy Room was one of Mom’s ninety-seven commandments. I wondered if she knew Dad was breaking it now.
“These aren’t quite as good as Oreos,” Dad said, holding up his graham cracker. “But they’ll do.” He finally took a bite, and the two of us sat and quietly worked our way through half a sleeve of them. After his third or fourth cracker, he sighed heavily. “You know, your grandfather . . . Frank . . . he was never . . . I mean, we didn’t . . .” Dad’s jaw worked back and forth as if he was chewing over all the words that might finish these sentences. Then, as if they’d all left a bad taste in his mouth, he slid another cracker out of its sleeve and handed me the rest of the box. He pushed himself up off the bed, turned, and looked me in the eyes. “This is good. This is what I needed. Thanks, Ri.”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said, though all I’d done was sit there and eat.
“We’re downstairs if you need anything.” He squeezed my knee, then worked his way across my room, dodging the piles of dirty laundry.
“Dad,” I called, catching him as he slipped out the door. He stuck his face back through.
I knew I should say something, I wanted to say something, but “I’m sorry” didn’t seem like enough. Then again, probably nothing would be.
“Thanks for dinner,” I said, holding up the box.
“Just don’t tell your mother.” Dad flicked off a crumb that had stuck to his bow tie and padded down the hallway, leaving the door open a crack.