Her thoughts drifting and her hands busy with the bread, the relish dishes and the dipping vegetables, Gladys heard a noise in the living room that sounded like the door opening. She didn’t look up right away because she had her hands full and was in the habit of concentrating on such maneuvers these days.
“That you Danny?” she said, setting the veggie tray on the counter and standing the water pitcher next to it. She turned as quickly as her old hips would allow and saw no one. Certainly, she would have heard Danny by now if he was in the living room. He was too old for hiding games. Gladys shuffled to the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room and surveyed the living room. Instead of focusing on the confusion over hearing someone come in the door, when clearly no one had, she assessed the neatness of the couch, chairs and throw pillows in the living room, and then returned to the task of moving food out to the dining room table. The part of her mind that catalogued strange occurrences, and brain blips, would have to make an appointment. She was busy now getting ready for her grandson’s visit.
Fifteen minutes later, the last of the plates in place and napkins arranged, the doorbell rang and the front door swung open. Gladys turned from the table to the door and grinned.
“Grandma!” Danny greeted her with a smile, white teeth showing and cheeks rosy from the cold. Behind her twenty-one-year-old grandson, stood a slim stem of a girl with a cream-colored hat pulled over her long brunette hair. Her big brown eyes smiled at the joy of her boyfriend and his grandmother embracing.
“Oh, so good to see you, Danny. And good to meet your girl too,” Gladys said, truncating the hugs for a look at Rachel.
“I’m so happy to meet you, Mrs. Hight,” Rachel said, pulling off her knit mitten and reaching a willowy hand in greeting.
Gladys took that hand in both of hers, glad to provide a little warmth, which she had acquired from preparing the meal. “You can call me Gladys or Grandma, if you like. Mrs. Hight sounds so formal. And I’d keep looking around for my mother-in-law if you kept it up.”
Rachel’s grin twitched slightly with uncertainty about what to call Gladys and what the old woman was saying about her mother-in-law. She nervously pulled off her hat and primped her hair, looking at Danny for some help.
“Grandpa used to call you ‘Gladdy,’” Danny said, tipping his head as he pulled at his gloves and maintained his sunny smile.
“Oh, yeah. You could call me that too,” she said, raising an eyebrow and staring off toward the hallway for a second.
“Gladdy,” Rachel said. “Oh, that’s so cute.” As soon as she said that, Rachel wondered whether it was too patronizing, and then tripped off into worrying what to say about Gladys’s deceased husband. Unfortunately for Rachel, she was not innocent about the motivation for their visit, and had to untangle herself from speculating about whether Gladys really knew her husband was no longer living.
“Come on in and get your coats off,” Gladys said, sparing Rachel any more pondering. She opened the closet door and searched for two more hangers amidst the coats. She handed hangers to Danny one at a time, as she discovered them from between wool, flannel and denim.
Danny stood a head taller than Gladys, now that he was full grown and her bones were settling, her back hunching more each decade. He wore no hat, to preserve his gelled brown hair, complete with blonde highlights. Like Gladys, he had hazel eyes and a valentine-shaped face when he smiled. His full lips also came from Gladys, by way of his mother.
“I’ll hang ‘em up,” Danny said at half volume, squeezing past Gladys. “So how are you feeling these days, Grandma?”
Gladys chuckled. “You should know better than to ask that question of someone my age. You could be stuck listening here for hours.” She waved a dismissive hand and turned toward the kitchen. The pace of her step, however, answered Danny’s inquiry as articulately as any words she might have ventured.
“The ladies at the church Bible study, on Thursday mornings, have all agreed to limit ourselves to two minutes each, when we talk about our doctor visits and surgeries and such. Otherwise we’d never get to the Bible stuff.” Gladys said this over her shoulder as she reached the kitchen.
“I’m guessing you’re hungry for lunch by now,” she said, stopping in the kitchen door to look back at Danny straightening his sweater and reaching an arm to encircle Rachel’s waist.
Rachel answered. “Oh, I am pretty hungry. Let me help you in the kitchen. I wanna learn your tricks. Danny says you’re the best cook in the world.”
Even Gladys could see that this was a clever ploy for the young woman to provide a helping hand. But Gladys didn’t resist. “In the whole world, huh?” Her voice took a singing tone as she considered her bestowed title. She recognized her daughter’s penchant for exaggeration reincarnated in her grandson, assuming Rachel had not inflated his words.
As much as Gladys liked being in charge of all the elements of a meal, she surrendered that urge in favor of working shoulder-to-shoulder with Rachel, if even for just a minute or two. “Okay, you come in and help me get things out of the fridge,” she said. “And, Danny, maybe you could pour the water.” She waved her hand toward the water pitcher, which had made it as far as the dining room table.
“Oh, so I’m supposed to trust you two women in there, talking about me,” Danny said, with a wink.
“Oh, we have better things to talk about than you,” Gladys said, her fake frown trumping Danny’s wink.
Rachel laughed at the spunk of the little grandma and the cheek of her boyfriend. She was beginning to see where Danny inherited his tendency to tease. Rachel followed Gladys into the kitchen, pausing briefly to look over her shoulder and bob her eyebrows up and down, a taunt that Danny had seen before, in different circumstances.
When Rachel slipped in next to Gladys, she caught the older woman wincing, as she pulled the refrigerator door open and side-stepped around it. This simple move wouldn’t have drawn any notice, if the hips and feet involved were Rachel’s.
“Are you okay?” Rachel said, taking hold of the door and standing ready to receive the food Gladys pulled out.
“Oh, I’m fine, just twisted funny when I opened the door. Wasn’t payin’ attention to how I did that.” Gladys reached in for the bowls of tuna salad and egg salad, handing both to Rachel. “Let’s just keep that little goof between us girls, shall we?”
This attempted cover-up caught Rachel between concern for what seemed like significant pain on the one hand, and the desire to please Gladys, on the other. Lacking clarity about how intense Gladys’s distress really was, she just said, “Okay,” uncertain about the consequences of keeping that confidence.
“As you get older, you just figure out what things you can do and what things you can’t do. I’ve given up auditioning for Dancing with the Stars these days,” Gladys said, washing some of the concern out of Rachel with her little joke. Referring to the sandwich ingredients, she said, “I didn’t know which you would like, so I waited to put the sandwiches together until you got here.” She pulled two loaves of store-bought bread out of the fridge and led Rachel to the counter, where Kaiser rolls and home-made sour dough bread sat waiting.
“So you have four choices of bread, and either egg salad or tuna salad.”
Rachel looked at the abundance of food for the three of them. “Well, Danny says your tuna salad is to die for, so I’ll give that a try.”
“You want your bread toasted?” Gladys said.
“Oh, yes. I’ll try the homemade and toasted.”
Gladys grinned. She liked Rachel more and more every minute. The girl seemed to know instinctively how to be as gracious in accepting what was offered as she was persuasive in offering her help. Gladys sliced inch-thick slabs of the sour dough and placed four of them in the toaster oven.
“Now that you see what’s on, go ask Danny what he would like,” Gladys said, pulling out a Kaiser roll for herself.
When Rachel returned with Danny’s order, Gladys was back in the fridge, this
time pulling out the lettuce and the tomato slices, which she had cut and wrapped before she went to church that morning. She handed these to Rachel and pulled mustard, mayonnaise and margarine out of their places in the fridge door, following Rachel back to the counter where sandwich assembly would take place.
Rachel noticed a picture on the windows sill, just above the sandwich station. “Who’s that in the photo?”
Gladys paused, looked up at the old black-and-white photo in a slightly tarnished brass frame, and thought for a minute. “Well, I know that’s Harry and me, but I’m forgetting the name of his sister-in-law just now. Don’t get old kid, it’s no fun.” In the pause while Rachel laughed, Gladys recovered the name of both Harry’s brother, whom she had not admitted forgetting, and his first wife, who died in the 1970s. “Oh, I remember. That’s Evelyn, Charlie’s wife. Harry was my husband, Charlie his brother and Evelyn was Charlie’s first wife. She died of cancer about forty years ago.”
“Is Charlie still alive?” Rachel looked at the two couples standing together next to a tree, in front of a lake, all in white shirts, all looking a bit sunburned, perhaps.
“Yes, he is. He lives in California with his third wife. He just keeps outliving ‘em.” Gladys glanced at the toaster and then back at the photo. “Evelyn was a Lake Forest graduate and liked to let everyone know that, like it was a royal pedigree or something. She didn’t really like Harry and me, we were too common for her. I never knew why she hitched up with Charlie, he was no upper crusty type either.” Gladys flipped the toaster to off, just before the pieces of bread next to the glass had fully converted to golden brown. “I guess it’s a good thing Evelyn didn’t live ‘til today, with people throwing the “B” word around so much.”
Rachel looked at Gladys wide-eyed, surprised Danny’s church-going grandma had come that close to using questionable language, as her mother would say. In Rachel’s family, she rarely heard such honest assessments of relatives, living or dead. She liked Gladys, the way the straight-laced kids have always enjoyed the vicarious freedom they feel at watching the class troublemaker busting loose. Rachel wanted to be like Gladys when she got old, minus the painful hips, of course.
“But you look like you’re having a good time,” Rachel said, perhaps teasing a bit, to get Gladys to say more.
Danny ambled into the kitchen as Gladys pulled the toast out of the oven.
Rachel greeted him with a poke. “Still haven’t gotten around to talking about you yet.”
Danny, who was texting a friend, looked up at Rachel and smiled. He could see the saucy influence of his grandmother on Rachel and enjoyed it as far as it had gone. “Oh, then I guess I can come back later.” Danny smiled, turning back toward the dining room.
“Come here and get this stuff for the table, before you go back there,” Gladys said, her voice rising to give orders amidst the mirth.
To Danny, it was just like old times. He could almost hear his grandfather yelling at the TV, urging his team to pull through or, maybe, to give up. Grandma’s house smelled the same to Danny, as well, and he inhaled a rare breath of nostalgia with the scents of roast beef a day or two old, of fresh sourdough bread, of the lemony polish his grandma used on the wood furniture, and of the lilac water that she splashed on when she dressed, as both deodorant and perfume.
Seated around the dining room table on benches, as always, they enjoyed the fresh and tasty lunch, topped off with Danny’s favorite dessert. Gladys dished him a quarter of the pie and he savored it for nearly ten minutes, sipping strong black coffee to prolong the pleasure. Only after a moment of silence, in memory of the meal’s passing, did Danny drop evidence of his intelligence-gathering assignment at his grandma’s house.
“You’re still as great a cook as ever, Grandma,” Danny said casually. Then, without thinking how it would sound, he said, “Mom was worried about you. You should make her a meal, to show her that you’re doing fine.”
“Did she send you here to give me a checkup?” Gladys stopped halfway between the table and the kitchen, the depleted plate of dipping vegies gripped in both hands.
Stopping to recall how much he had just said, Danny sought some cover. “I’ve been wanting to come visit you since New Year’s. She was worried, and I thought it was a great time for me to come see you.” With as much as he had already leaked, Danny knew he had to admit to at least half of the grand plot. “So, I just told her I would come visit and then she could stop worrying.”
Gladys shrugged. “I’ll take any excuse to get you over here for a visit. It doesn’t matter to me. One of these days I’ll phone you up and say, ‘I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up.’” She imitated the brassy voice of a woman she heard on a TV commercial.
Danny and Rachel both laughed, the humor mixed in with relief that Gladys didn’t seem angry at the idea of them checking up on her. “Yeah, but now you told me,” Danny said, “you gotta be careful. You know the story of the grandma who cried ‘wolf.’”
As she turned to the kitchen, Gladys tossed her head confidently. “Wolves don’t scare me none.”
A few minutes later, the three of them were elbow-to-elbow in the kitchen, doing dishes and stowing food in the fridge, or in the box Gladys prepared for Danny to take with him.
Curiosity finally drove Danny to take a chance. “So what is it you said to Mom that made her so panicky?”
Rachel made a shocked little face at Danny in an effort to temper his boldness, but Gladys went ahead and answered. “Actually, it’s been eating at me since she and I talked. I said something to her about talkin’ to her father.” She paused as she dropped a whipped topping container filled with egg salad into Danny’s care package. “You know how it is when you’re not really thinking, and you just say something out of habit. I think that was it.”
To Danny’s familiar ear, his grandmother only sounded about half-convinced of her own explanation. But Rachel, less accustomed to the plain and careless way Gladys spoke, offered her corroboration.
“Oh, yeah,” Rachel said. “Last summer, when I had this telemarketing job, I was getting bored and really tired of saying the same thing over and over again. Then, on one call, instead of giving the scripted closing lines for a message on an answering machine, I started to say The Lord’s Prayer, just automatically.” She laughed at the shocked looks on Danny’s and Gladys’s faces. “I know. It was so embarrassing. And how do you cover up for that? I just got flustered and hung up.”
That anecdote deflected the conversation away from Gladys’s lapses in memory, and that was the end of the discussion, and the end of any attempt at a mental checkup. Danny would report a perfectly fit and alert grandma to his mother.
The three of them sat scrunched together on the couch in the living room, Gladys in the middle, holding a photo album of Danny’s childhood. Less self-conscious than most kids, Danny didn’t mind Rachel foraging around in his memories and hearing his grandmother’s commentary on them. He didn’t have to remind Gladys of any of the names of the people in the pictures, and she knew more than he did of the details of the events depicted in those blotchy, glossy prints from her old instamatic camera, which she used well past its prime, into the era of digital cameras.
She did pause extra-long at a close-up picture of her husband, Harry, sitting in a big easy chair with Danny on his lap, reading him the sports page, as if it was a children’s story. The profile shot of a man near seventy years old, with thick bifocals in black plastic frames, looked like a glimpse of a man full of life and personality. But Gladys’s comment, when she finally turned away from the photo, seemed odd to her listeners.
“Wish he was here, so I could really give him a piece of my mind,” she said, in a subdued tone, filled with mystery, but little emotion.
Both Danny and Rachel were so shocked that they didn’t ask what she meant. Rachel, once again, took on the task of transitioning to more comfortable territory. She pointed to a picture of Danny at age four, standing in a kids’ plastic wading pool
shouting at the camera. “I guess he didn’t realize it wasn’t gonna record sound,” she said in a teasing tone.
Gladys just smiled, and Danny bypassed the urge to defend himself, drawn in by the uninhibited picture of his younger self.
His grandmother provided the commentary. “Oh, he was always full of piss and vinegar, just like the rest of ‘em,” she said.
Rachel covered her mouth at the sound of that crude old phrase. Danny just chuckled.
Chapter 3
HAUNTED
When they had hugged, and rehugged, by the door, and she had finally closed it behind the kids, Gladys watched through the little square of glass in the solid wood door, as Danny and Rachel got in the car. When Danny started it up and pulled away from the curb, he waved toward the house as was family custom. Gladys relaxed her back, which she had been forcing straighter to see out of the high window.
It was just late afternoon, but Danny had a bit of a drive back to Madison, and both of the students had work to do before classes the next day. Gladys, wheels fitted to the old ruts, naturally gravitated toward the kitchen. Once there, she was pleasantly surprised at how good it looked, only a few dishes in the dish drainer to testify to the guests and food that had captured her energy and attention over the past twenty-four hours. Satisfied with her survey of the realm, Gladys started to turn back to the living room. She was startled at the sound of someone sitting in Harry’s favorite old rocker-recliner. Her first thought was that the kids had forgotten something.
“Danny?” She stopped as soon as she started. The living room was empty, but the rocker was just settling down from someone apparently getting out of it. If she still had a cat, Gladys would have known what had happened. But she was supposed to be alone in the house now.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 2
