If I Lose Her (19 page)

 “Hah, okay.
What time?”

 “How’s
seven?”

 “Sounds
great. I’ll see you at seven.”

 “You should
bring Jo with you.”

 “Is that
okay?”

 “Are you
kidding? She’s going to be my new daughter-in-law. Of course it’s okay.”

 I kissed her
again and left the store.

 As I drove
past the Flatirons I thought about the ring.

 
I could
ask Jo to marry me tonight!

 
I hit
my steering wheel in excitement.

 
But wait,
I want it to be perfect. Should I ask her at my apartment? Candles? What kind
of music does someone play when they’re asking someone to be your wife? Do I
need to talk to her dad first? No, that’s too old fashioned. We can talk to
them about it together. Jo Douglas. Jolene Douglas. Mrs. Alex Douglas. Alex and
Jolene Douglas. I’m getting married!

 It was
nearly seven in the evening. Jo and I were on our way to my mother’s for dinner.
I was thinking about how my life made so much more sense when we were together.
Her pinky had found its way over and wrapped itself around mine while I shifted
gears. Then I looked over and saw her smiling at me.

 “Whatcha
thinking about?” She asked me.

 
How I’m
going to ask you to marry me.

 “How great
it is when we are together, and how hungry I am. You?”

 “Just how
handsome you are.”

 I could feel
the blood rush to my cheeks.

 She giggled
and touched the side of my head.

 “If you had
one wish, what would it be?” I asked her.

 She thought
for a minute. “I’d wish that I could stay with you forever.”

 “Forever’s a
long time. You sure you could put up with me for that long?”

 “Pretty
sure.”

 
God, I
want to marry you.

 I squeezed
her hand and tried with all my strength not to let on what I was thinking.

 “Well, I’m
not going anywhere,” I said.

 She turned
and looked out the window.

 We pulled up
to my mother’s house, knocked on the door and she welcomed us in. I looked
around and strangely didn’t notice many of the obvious signs of Peter’s
presence. It was almost like the last year-and-a-half had never happened. She
kissed our cheeks, we took off our shoes and she led us into the kitchen where
spicy steak bubbled in a pan. Chopped vegetables of every color of the rainbow
were lying on the counter next to her. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Avocados. Red and
yellow peppers. Pinto beans. Ding! She opened the microwave door and took out a
warming dish of tortillas.

 “We’re
having fajita’s. I hope that’s okay.”

 “It smells
wonderful,” Jo replied.

 “I picked up
something fun at the grocer when I was there this afternoon.” Then she reached
into the refrigerator and revealed three glass bottles of Tamarind soda.
“They’re Mexican sodas. They were on sale and I figured, let’s give ‘em a try.”

 I twisted
the metal cap off of one and took a drink. It tasted sweet but different than
anything I had tasted before, like a kind of savory fruit almost. “It’s good,”
I told her reading the label on the glass bottle.

 “Yeah?
Good.” Then she wrapped a tea towel around her hand and reached into the oven.
“The restaurant over on 32
^nd
does a delicious queso that I had to
try.” She set a hot plate down covered in melted cheese and red sauce. “I got
these to eat with it,” she said setting down a basket of tortilla chips.

 “You’ve went
all out,” I told her ready to inhale everything; it all smelled so good. I
leaned over the queso and took in its aroma. The smell of chili tickled my
nose.

 “Well, I
thought we don’t get to do this that much anymore, thanks to my husband.” Then
she turned and stirred the steak. “Dig in, please,” she said scooping some of
the queso left in the pan onto a chip and tossing it into her mouth.

 The spices
hit the back of my throat causing my eyes to water.

 “Wow, that’s
got some kick to it,” I said taking a drink from my soda.

 “Is it too
much? Maybe I should have used less chili pepper.”

 “I like it,”
Jo said scooping another pile of cheese into her mouth.

 “There it
is, a woman after my own heart,” my mother said smiling. “Alex, never could
handle anything hotter than ketchup.”

 “Hey now, I
can hold my own.” I dug a tortilla chip further into the cheese and took a
bite. Then I started coughing, “okay maybe not.”

 She set a
plate of the vegetables and the hot pan of sizzling steak onto the table. The
tortillas were warm and almost burned your fingers if you held them for too
long, but we were all hungry so we took fist-fulls of food and began eating.

 “Oh, I
almost forgot,” she said as she rose from her chair. She came back with a bowl
of refried beans with a sprinkling of cheese on top. A streak of sauce ran down
my chin as I bit into my fajita, which I wiped away with my napkin.

 “I know how
you feel about Peter,” my mother said as I kissed her goodnight. “But, I wish
you’d come by ONCE in a while, even if it was just for dinner.”

 I nodded.

 I drove Jo
back to her parents and parked on the side street, under a tree where I knew we
were just out of sight.

 “I was
wondering if you might want to go to a show with me downtown,” I said taking
Jo’s hand in mine. “ ‘Les Miserables’ is playing downtown at the Buell, and I
thought we could make a night of it. Maybe dinner at the Brown Palace first
then the show?”

 “Ah, that
sounds great. I’ve been wanting to see ‘Les Miserables’,” she said. Then we
said goodnight and I let her out. On the way home my cell phone rang. It was
mom.

 “Hey!”

 “Alex?”

 “Yeah?”

 “I just got
off the phone with Lauren.” She started sobbing. “Your grandmother’s dead.”

 “Oh momma,
are you okay?”

 “I guess she
was at Lauren’s for the evening. Your aunti said she fell asleep in the living
room, and when they went to wake her to take her home, she was gone. She was
just gone. Lauren said they had just finished dinner not more than twenty
minutes earlier.”

 Now the sobs
are coming in rolling waves.

 “Okay, I’m
turning around. I’ll be to you in ten minutes.” Then I hung up the phone.

 On my way I
called Jo and told her what was happening.

 “Are you
okay? Do you need anything?”

 “No, I’m
okay. I’m just heading back over to mom’s now, to be with her. I’ll call you in
the morning and give you an update.”

 “Okay.”

 I was on the
phone most of the next few hours, talking with my aunt and letting a couple of
cousins know what was going on who were on the West coast where it wasn’t too
late yet.

 “I’m going
to have to go out to Minnesota to sort everything out,” my mother said sitting
on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, half lost in a daze.

 “Can aunti
handle it?”

 “She’s never
been any good at this sort of thing. I can talk to Jenny and have her work a
couple of doubles at the store. We’ll close early if we have to.”

 “What can I
do?”

 “I don’t
know. The funeral will probably have to be in a few days. I don’t think you can
wait that long with that sort of thing. Is that going to cause you problems at
the paper?”

 “It
shouldn’t. I have a little bit of vacation time saved up now that I’m working
there full time, and I’ll just do some catch up work at school.”

 “I need to
call Peter,” she said almost startled by the realization. Then she rose up and
dialed his number. There was no answer.

 She dropped
back down on the couch. “Oh momma,” she whispered and began crying again.

 Sometime
after midnight my mother assured me that she was going to be alright and I went
home.

 On the way
into downtown I thought about all of our Minnesota summers, and how those days
were over. Just. Like. That.

 Three days
later I found myself sitting in the front row of the Assemblies of God church
in Fairbault Minnesota, one of the churches that my grandfather built
half-a-century ago, and a portrait of my grandfather and my grandfather sat on
a bronze colored casket framed with flowers. She wasn’t in the casket. She was
cremated, but my aunt was always squeamish about the idea of burning the bodies
of her mother and father so, as a strange sort of compromise, they were
cremated and their urn placed inside of a casket that was buried. This way my
aunt didn’t have to think about their bodies being reduced to dirt and ash all
through the funeral, and I’ll be honest, having a casket at the funeral made me
feel a little better too. It was more than a little disconcerting to think that
my little grandmother, who I had talked to on the phone just a few weeks
earlier, was now a grey pile of dust tucked away in a box locked in a casket in
front of the church that she and her husband of 63 years built half a century
earlier.

 I tried not
to let it bother me, but the idea of Peter sitting in the front row, nodding at
everything the pastor said, inserting an amen here and there, like he had
belonged all along, just made me remember how much my grandmother had told me
that she never trusted him. As I looked at him I thought how maybe my
grandmother and I were both wrong. He did some awful stuff, but maybe he had
changed. My mother seemed happy now, and maybe that’s all that mattered.

 I looked
around the sanctuary.

 There
weren’t that many people in the pews. There was the pastor and his wife, me, my
mother and Peter, my aunt Lauren and my cousin Sarah. Mike was still overseas
and couldn’t make it home. There were two other pastors who took turns speaking
and their wives and about forty people who I guessed were from her church. 83
years old and this was all who was left. Back in high school, one of the girls
in my geography class had a brother who died in a car accident. Just about
everyone I knew, including myself, went, not so much because I knew either of
them, which I didn’t, but because it felt almost obligatory. His funeral was
held in the largest church in Denver and it was packed. You would think that
someone who had lived 83 years would know more people than someone who had lived
only 16. There were three guest singers and a line to pay your respects to the
family that went on for 45 minutes. My mother was the only one who sang at my
grandmother’s, and even if everyone in here lined up to say goodbye, I couldn’t
imagine it taking more than the time it would take for me to tie my shoes.

 But, when I
looked at the smiling face of that tiny woman who always made me my favorite
chocolate chip date cookies, I knew a part of the safety of my childhood was
gone forever.

 After the
funeral everyone went back to my grandmother’s house to share food and warm
memories, and as I drove, I thought about my grandfather who died when I was
ten. I remembered how his hands were so much bigger than mine, the thin white
hair that crowned his otherwise bald head and the salt streaks from the tears
that dried on his cheeks that I touched the day we visited him at the funeral
home. He was a leader. A man of faith. A man of virtue. So many things I wish I
could be; so many things that I did not see when I looked in the mirror.

 For ten
years after my grandfather died, my grandmother lived in her little house
alone, with her peach trees and her pear trees, all bearing fruit every summer,
which she turned into jams and pies for church. Hers was a house regularly
cleaned with everything in its place. The china had its place, the forks and
spoons had their place, her bills had their place, even the porcelain Dalmatian
that I rode like a horse when I was five had its place, right beside the couch
where she would fall asleep in the afternoons watching the news or some gospel
program.

 I came and
lived with her for the summer when I was sixteen. She would hug me and tell me
how my grandfather’s hugs were what she missed the most, that and his bristly
cheeks. We would sit and she would show me photographs of my mother with blonde
curly hair and tell me stories about my mother and my aunt when they were
girls. She also told me secrets about my grandfather that only a wife could
know. Secrets like how, when he was a boy in school, one summer his parents
could not afford him shoes so he wore an old pair of his sisters and as a
result, some of his school mates made fun of him and knocked his books into the
snow and urinated on them. Or how, when they were first married, she was so
scared of having sex with him that, out of respect for her, he waited three
weeks before they consummated their marriage. I always thought that my
grandfather was the strongest member of our little family, but now I wonder if
that distinction belonged to my grandmother.

  She
said what she believed; she couldn’t be moved, but she wouldn’t fight about it
either. My mother dating Peter was a good example. If my mother wanted to date
Peter then that was up to her. My grandmother never minced words about how much
she didn’t trust him, but ultimately it was my mother’s decision. There were a
lot of things my mother did that my grandmother didn’t like, but she still
loved her. I’m just not sure my mother ever realized it.

 I parked in
the front yard and could see that the house was already full of people. Then I
walked through the front door. A set of dirty shoe prints on my grandmother’s
white linoleum made me choke back tears. I knew how much the dirt would have
bothered her. I went into the kitchen, got a bit of moist paper towel and wiped
up the shoe prints.

 I walked
from room to room remembering.

 In the
office I swore I could still smell my grandfather’s cologne. I looked at the
photographs hanging on the wall of moments never to be had again. I ran my
fingers over the library of dusty books. The mint green couch. The gold lamp
that turned on when you touched it. I could still see my grandfather sitting at
the desk reading the Bible and ten years later my little grandmother hunched over
a calculator paying some bills. The grandfather clock chimed half-past the
hour. I walked into the little guest bedroom and remembered how the night I
first came to stay with her I ran to the grocery store for some cereal and
milk, and when I returned I found all of the clothes in my luggage folded and
put away. In the guest bathroom I remembered how I had emptied a small
container of cotton swabs one day, but when I came home that evening I found
the container refilled. Then I walked into my grandmother’s bedroom. Peter’s
muddy boots were lying on the floor at the foot of my grandmother’s bed.