Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  “No,” I said. “Don’t bother Grandma. I’ll be fine with Mrs. Coffey.”

  “Are you sure? Two weeks is a long time.”

  I shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like I have to worry about school or anything. I’ll just be mowing lawns for the next two weeks anyway.”

  “You be careful with that mower. You always wear shoes?”

  “I wear shoes, Dad. Anyway, it’s just a push mower. But I guess I could lie down and have Ed push it over me. It would be pretty dramatic.”

  He gave me one of those half smiles that only made me feel worse, because I had a hard time remembering his real ones. “Don’t get Ed to maul you. I’ll call Mrs. Coffey this morning and make sure she’ll be here until the twenty-sixth. But if you get to worrying, we can always call Grandma. She can be down here the next day.”

  “Okay,” I said, knowing that there was no way I was bothering Grandma, who has a bad hip and cataracts in both eyes. I didn’t need that much taking care of. I was practically college-bound, for God’s sake. “Do you want me to drive you to the airport?”

  “Actually, I’m going straight from work, so I’ll take a cab.”

  “Okay,” I said again. “So, like, tomorrow?”

  He swallowed uncomfortably. “Actually, I’m leaving this evening.”

  “Today?” I said, louder than I meant to, and then, also without meaning to, cut a glance out the window toward the Rothgars’ house. He followed my eyes without comment.

  “You have Grandma’s number in your phone, right?”

  “Yeah, of course. And yours, too.”

  “Good,” he said, getting up and putting his mug in the dishwasher. “Well. You know who to call, then, if you need anything.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder for about half a second and then made for the door. “Bye, Dad,” I called.

  He turned back at the last minute, did that half-smile thing again, and waved. Then he left.

  I sat there for a good ten minutes, staring at my babka and stewing because freaking Rex Rothgar had made my father worse than he’d been in years and driven him out of his own house. Ellen wouldn’t be back anytime soon, which meant that there’d probably be another party tonight, and again tomorrow, and tomorrow, ad infinitum.

  When I was fifteen and had just gotten my learner’s permit, my dad took me out for a driving lesson.

  I’d passed driver’s ed and thought I was the awesomest thing on four wheels, and I’d already started saving up for my dream car, which I imagined driving at insane speeds, cornering like a rally driver, on the road trips I’d be taking every weekend.

  Dad and I were going through downtown Chambliss and I rolled down my window, even though I knew the wind was bothering Dad, because I was fifteen and behind the wheel of a car and an ass.

  I also knew my dad was too stoic to actually say that the wind was bothering him.

  We drove down the main drag twice while I practiced my left turns and my signaling, and I was starting to get pretty confident because I’d just gotten to the point where I could turn the wheel without wringing the life out of it with both hands. I switched on the radio and glanced at my dad, who had his jaw clenched and was staring blankly out the windshield and clutching his seat belt with his fingers.

  Some part of me said, Turn it off. But a larger part said, You are in control of a two-ton steel beast! You are a god!

  Then some old lady pulled out in front of me without looking, and I jerked the wheel so I wouldn’t hit her and ended up going off the road at thirty miles an hour and hit a lamppost.

  The air bags went off. By the time I’d beaten mine back down, my dad was gone.

  Not gone as in out of the car. Gone as in my six-two soldier father curled into a ball and unable to speak or open his eyes.

  I thought he was having a heart attack or a stroke because of the accident. But the ER doctor told me it was a panic attack.

  He yanked me out into the hallway after he’d finished with my dad.

  “How often is he in therapy?” he asked.

  I was shaking from the accident and my head hurt from whiplash, but I sure wasn’t going to complain about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t…” He scratched his eyebrow. “I shouldn’t even be asking you this. Your mother?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just us,” I said. Zip was already in New York then.

  He tucked his clipboard against his hip and glared at me. “All right,” he said. “Here’s the thing. You can’t pull any more stunts like you pulled today. Do you understand me? In a couple of hours, we’re going to send him home, and you need to be a model kid from here on out.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I protested. “She pulled right out in front of me.”

  “You were speeding.”

  “No,” I said. “I really wasn’t.” But I wasn’t really sure if I had been or not.

  He shook his head and shoved a business card at me. “This is the number of the social worker here at the hospital,” he said. “In case you need it. But you’ll probably get better services at the VA. Do you have a caseworker? Do you know the number?”

  I looked at the card in my hand for Melinda Daniels, LCSW, and wondered if she was a distant relation of Punctuation Lady.

  “Yeah,” I said. “His caseworker. Sure.”

  Four hours later, they sent us home with a bottle of Xanax, and I realized that it didn’t matter if it had been my fault or the fault of the lady in the giant sky-blue Oldsmobile. I was the only thing standing between my dad and everything else in the world that wanted to extinguish him.

  It was Minnie Taylor who drove us home that night, forced me to eat something, and sat with me until bedtime.

  It was Mrs. Lee who eventually taught me to drive.

  I threw my babka away and called Ed.

  Ed Park is not awake at seven in the morning. I am usually pretty aware of this, but that morning my brain was not yet engaged. I realized my error as soon as he picked up the phone.

  Ed: “Mmmrph.”

  Me: “Oh. Shoot. Sorry.”

  Ed: “Fnnnr.”

  Me: “Just call me back.”

  Ed: “No. I am awake now, thank you. What’s up?”

  Me: “My father just left the house with a suitcase.”

  There was a lot of rustling, which signaled Ed getting up. “Oh,” he said. “Holy crap. What does that mean?”

  It meant that I would really prefer not to go swimming in Lake Heorot with the snakes again, but there was no one who was going to fix this for me. No matter how much I wanted to ignore the situation, I couldn’t forget: there were more important things than what I wanted.

  “It means,” I said, “that I am about to own Rex Rothgar.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Boldness. Brilliance. Manliness.

  I said, “Guile.”

  Sometime later, Ed and I were huddling in front of aisle seven at Best Buy, because my plan involved guile and also electronics. “Do you still have that old satellite dish?” I asked. The Parks used to have DirecTV before Ed’s mother caught his older brother watching Cinemax After Dark and shut the entire thing down.

  “I think it’s in the basement,” he said, throwing a coil of audio cord into the cart. “So what happened with Willow last night?”

  I bumped my toe on the shopping cart and cursed. “Nothing happened with Willow last night.”

  “You sure about that?”

  I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “Here is what went down. I talked to her. She talked to me. Then she abandoned me to the machinations of her psychopath brother and his friends. Then I went swimming. The end.”

  “Dude. She just walked off and let him throw you in the lake?”

  “That was precisely what occurred, yes.”

  Ed whistled. “That’s harsh, Grendel.” He sorted through some DC adapters before giving up. “I think we need a longer exte
nsion cord. So are you still into her?”

  I bugged my eyes at him. “You aren’t serious.”

  He shrugged.

  “No, I’m done with that. I have pretty low standards, but even I have to draw the line at ambivalence about my personal safety.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I threw a couple of extension cords into the cart. “I think that’s it.”

  “Good,” he said. “I have work in half an hour. Do you want to come by?”

  “Can’t today,” I said. “I’m interviewing Mrs. DeLuca at three. Maybe after.”

  We wheeled the cart to the checkout line and waited behind a mom-aged person who was buying herself a new phone and grilling the cashier about the extended service plan.

  “I need this to work,” she said. “I can’t have it dying on me.”

  I picked up the audio cord and passed it onto the counter while the woman repeated, “I need this to work.”

  I thought of my dad in a Tampa hotel room, sleeping the sleep of an old soldier in a strange bed, and said, “Ma’am, that’s what we all need.”

  After I dropped my stuff off at home, I grabbed my mower and my MP3 recorder and went to Marianne DeLuca’s house, ignoring Virginia Werm, my across-the-street neighbor, who was screaming at the mailman at the end of her driveway as I walked by. The mailman was protesting, “I’m not in charge of the mailing lists, ma’am!” while she shook a stack of junk mail at him through his windshield. She screamed, “Take your SMUT with you!” and flung what looked like a Victoria’s Secret catalog at the truck as the mailman hastily pulled away.

  I left the mower propped by Mrs. DeLuca’s door before I knocked. I always do my interviews before I mow the grass, because it doesn’t work out so well if I’m slathered in sweat and out of breath while I’m trying to ask all my questions.

  I’ve done about thirty of these so far, so I have it pretty well down now. It took a while before I came up with a decent, customizable list of questions, plus I need to be able to improvise if I smell a good story that needs to be told. When I’m done, I type up the interview, then rewrite it as a story. I keep all of these printed out on the shelf under my window, along with some ancient sketchbooks and petrified watercolors long since abandoned. Ed once asked why I don’t just keep digital copies, and I do, but it seems really important to have everything printed out on paper for some reason.

  It took a long time for Mrs. DeLuca to come to the door.

  “Tommy,” she said, smiling slowly as she stood back so that I could come in. Her skin was paler than I’d seen it, and her eyes had a sunken look.

  “Hi, Mrs. DeLuca. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, Tommy, I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s sit in the kitchen. I’ll pour you some lemonade.”

  She shuffled back into the kitchen and I followed. The house was getting kind of run-down, and there was a fine layer of dust over all the horizontal surfaces. I wondered how long it had been since anyone but me had come over for a visit. I knew she had a lady who came in once or twice a week to do the shopping and drive her to her doctor’s appointments, but it didn’t seem like she was getting enough help.

  “Has your son been to visit lately, Mrs. DeLuca?” I asked haltingly.

  She pulled a quart of homemade lemonade out of the fridge, which was totally overstuffed with food. I hoped all of it was still safe to eat. “He’ll be here at Christmas,” she said. “He always comes at Easter and Christmas.”

  Twice a year didn’t seem often enough to visit a lady as old as Mrs. DeLuca, but I didn’t think there was much use in pointing that out. “If you like, I can come by and help out some afternoon,” I said. “Like, if you have something that needs fixing?” I looked around. “Or cleaning?”

  She sat down across from me. “I’m fine, Tommy. Maisie’ll be here tomorrow. Now, tell me some more about this interview you wanted to do.”

  I took a sip of my lemonade and struggled not to make a face. I was pretty sure she’d forgotten the sugar.

  “Well,” I said, clinking the ice cubes together in my glass, “I’m just trying to create a record of everyone in the neighborhood. Like a history.”

  She looked confused. “Is this for school?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “See, I’m just trying to write down these stories—”

  “Are you planning on writing a book?”

  “Well, maybe someday. I hadn’t really thought about it. It just seems like there are a lot of good stories, and I don’t want them to just disappear….” I stared down at the table. This was not going well.

  “When we all croak,” she said. Which was exactly the truth, but kind of rude.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said quietly.

  “It’s okay, Tommy. When you get to be my age, you come to peace with the idea that you’re not going to be around forever. Well, most of us do, anyway.” She glared across the street at Cookie Schwartz, who was pulling into the driveway in her Miata.

  “So,” she said. “You want all my secrets before I turn up my toes. But what are you going to do with them?”

  I kneaded my hands and stared at my sour lemonade some more. I thought about making something up, like I was going to donate everything to the historical society or the library or use it to get into college somehow, but instead I just told her the truth. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just—just keep them. I’ll make you a copy,” I offered. “You can keep it or give it to your son or whatever. I just don’t want it all to be. You know. Gone.”

  She thought about that for a few seconds and then nodded. “All right,” she said, spreading her hands in front of her on the table. “Do your worst.”

  “Really?” I said. “Okay. Um. Do you mind if I record this? It usually goes better if I don’t have to write everything down while we’re talking.”

  “Of course, Tommy.”

  I pulled my MP3 recorder out of my pocket and flipped it on.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, you can start off by telling me your full name, and where you were born, and when.”

  “Marianne Rosa Fiore DeLuca,” she said. “Born April second, 1932, in Austin, Texas.”

  So I started asking questions. Favorite movie, TV show, book. Best childhood memory. The problem with taking the life history of someone who’s eighty-five is that it can get a little overwhelming. You can ask someone questions for days and still never get everything. And asking people clichéd questions like What was the most interesting thing you ever did? never gets you anywhere, because you always end up hearing about the glories of having children, if they have them, or maybe some really good vacation they took. That’s what people feel like they’re supposed to say. If you really want to get at the meat of someone’s life, you have to sort of trip them up so they tell you by accident.

  “What was the biggest mistake you ever made?” I asked.

  She stopped short. “Well, now, that’s a question, Tommy Grendel.”

  “You don’t have to answer it,” I said. Sometimes that one got people twisted up. “I don’t want to be rude.”

  She glanced at my recorder. “Okay, then. Let me think about that. Well. I should have married John Romano before he shipped off to Korea.”

  “Oh,” I said. This was a little more honesty than I usually got. “Okay. Tell me about John Romano.”

  She got a little dreamy-eyed. “He was a beautiful man. He was my sweetheart when we were kids, and he wanted to marry me, you know. He asked me three times. He used to take me for drives every Sunday. We’d talk about everything. There wasn’t a thing in the world I didn’t know about John.”

  “But you said no?”

  “I thought I was too young, and my mother didn’t want me to marry a soldier.”

  “So he went off to Korea. How long was he gone?”

  “Ah, Tommy. He never came back.”

  I put down my pen. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. DeLuca.”

  “So was I, but that’s how it is, isn’t it? You n
ever know how much time you’re going to get on this earth. Especially if you’re a soldier. But I expect you know all about that, what with your daddy and all.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I cleared my throat. “But would you have had any more time with him? If you’d gotten married first?”

  “Not one hour, Tommy. Not one minute. But he died not knowing that’s what I wanted, and I’ve always regretted it.”

  “Oh.”

  “And after, I was only the girlfriend, not the widow. I didn’t get to sit in the front of the church for the funeral, since his parents didn’t much care for me.” She looked out the window for a minute, and the pink light that came through the curtains stained her face. “Anyway, I expect I wouldn’t have gotten married to George DeLuca so fast if I’d been a widow.”

  I paused, because I wanted to ask more, but I was afraid to. Sometimes, if you ask questions people are trying hard not to think about, they end up choking on truths they’d rather forget. I knew she’d been married to George DeLuca until he died, which was about five years ago. “Do you regret that?”

  “Marrying George? Well. I don’t know about that. He gave me my Philip.”

  That would be the son who never visits. “Right, of course.”

  “So I don’t know if I can say I exactly regret it. I’ll have to think about that.”

  “Of course, Mrs. DeLuca.”

  “Yes, I would have to think about that very hard….” Her voice trailed off and her eyes closed, and I realized she was nodding off. I hated leaving a bunch of unanswered questions, and I hadn’t even asked the important ones yet. My pen itched in my hand. I liked to start writing interviews up as soon as they were done, or they twitched in my brain. But sometimes there was just no helping it. This was one of those times. “Mrs. DeLuca?” I said quietly, reaching across the table to touch her hand, which felt like old paper. “Why don’t we finish this up tomorrow?”

  Her eyes slowly blinked open. “Tomorrow, Tommy? Are you sure?”

  “Sure, Mrs. DeLuca. I have to type up the first part of this anyway. Can I call you tomorrow?”