Somehow, Mom found out that Grandma knew about Dad’s death in advance. She never forgave Grandma-or spoke to her again. Two years later, Mom appeared in Grandma’s bedroom doorway in a hospital gown. She was dying of cancer. Grandma rushed to St. John’s Mercy and begged her daughter to forgive her. Mom went to her grave in stone-hard silence.
My cousin Jimmy wore jungle fatigues in Grandma’s doorway. Grandma wept when she saw her favorite grandson with a seeping chest wound. Then she called the Red Cross and said she needed to get in touch with Jimmy-it was an emergency.
“Does this concern a death in the family?” the Red Cross contact said.
“Not yet,” Grandma said.
The Red Cross dismissed her as a harmless nutcase. Three days later Cousin Jimmy was shot in Vietnam, but we didn’t know about his death for two weeks.
Grandma mourned Jimmy and blamed herself. “I should have lied,” she said. “I should have said his mother had died, and then they would have let my grandbaby come home.” But she was unable to lie about what she saw. It was part of her unwanted gift.
Here’s the weird thing about my grandmother: She looked like a picture-book Grandma. She had a comfortable flour-sack figure and permed gray hair. She put up grape jelly, made apple butter in a big kettle, baked pies with flaky crusts, canned her own tomatoes-and saw dead people in her bedroom doorway.
My grandfather did not stop by Grandma’s door before his heart attack. Grandma believed that was her punishment for her silence when my father was murdered. She found her husband of fifty years dead at the kitchen table, a deck of cards spread out on the Formica top. He’d been cheating at solitaire.
Why did Grandma see the dead three days before they passed over-when they were still alive? Grandma said time didn’t run in a straight line, the way we saw it in schoolbooks. “Time is all around us,” she said. “It’s happening all at once.” That was a pretty fair explanation of quantum physics from a woman who’d never finished grade school.
Much of what Grandma saw didn’t make sense until after it happened. Aunt Leila appeared in the doorway wearing a raincoat and fluffy pink bedroom slippers. Grandma thought that outfit was so ridiculous, she blamed the pickled herring she’d had for dinner. After three Turns, she decided to warn Leila. Grandma’s younger sister lived in a snooty suburb of St. Louis called Ladue. Leila thought Grandma’s town, Mehlville, was low-rent.
“I was wearing a raincoat and slippers? What have you been drinking, Emma?” Leila asked. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that getup.”
But she was. Three days later, Leila overslept, and her daughter, Annie, missed the school bus. Annie could lose her perfect attendance award. Aunt Leila threw her raincoat over her nightgown, grabbed her purse, and drove Annie to school. Aunt Leila was killed driving home when a woman ran a stop sign on McKnight Road. Leila was wearing fluffy pink slippers and a raincoat.
“I should have tried harder,” Grandma wept. “She wouldn’t believe me. Now I’m warning you.”
“What was I wearing in your doorway?” I asked. I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. I had a fifteen-year-old daughter. I wanted to see my Sarah go to her senior prom. I wanted to be there when she graduated from college, and at her wedding. I wanted to hold my grandchild in my arms.
“Oh, I didn’t see you,” Grandma said. “I just had a feeling.”
I took a deep breath and relaxed. Grandma’s “feelings” were right maybe half the time. I had a 50 percent chance of escape.
In 2006, Grandma “had a feeling” the St. Louis Cardinals would win the World Series and talked me into getting season tickets with her. She was triumphant when they won. Of course, she also thought the Cards would win in 2008. They had a miserable season. The Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays.
I took Grandma to the race track twice because she “had a feeling.” The first time, she won twenty-seven dollars. The second time, she lost fifty bucks on broken-down nags in what I called the Dog Food Trifecta-all three of her horses came in last.
Still, Grandma might be right this time. I fortified myself with more pie and asked, “Well, if I didn’t stop in your doorway, what’s going to happen?”
“I’m not sure,” Grandma said. “But it involves you and Angela and a crime.”
“Angela in a crime? No one is more honest than Angela. She keeps our books and insists on an independent audit every year. Besides, our design business doesn’t make enough money for her to steal.”
“I didn’t say she was stealing,” Grandma said. “Your Jack is working late a lot lately, isn’t he?”
“Jack’s architectural firm won the renovation project for the old NorCo shoe company building. They’re turning it into loft apartments. His proposal is due in two weeks.”
Why the sudden shift from my business partner to my husband? Oh, no. Jack wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. Angela was no angel, but she wouldn’t have an affair with my husband. Would she?
I put down my pie fork. “Grandma, Jack is working late. And he doesn’t like Angela. She’s not interested in him, either.”
“That’s what your father used to say, until-” Grandma said.
“He was shot,” I interrupted. “Jack is nothing like my father. That’s why I married him.”
“But what about Angela? She’s a good-looking woman.”
“Much better looking than me,” I said.
“Francine! I would never say that,” Grandma said.
“No, but you think it, like everyone else. Angela has a boyfriend. Actually, he’s a friend with benefits.”
“What’s that?” Grandma said.
“It means she likes him, and she sleeps with him sometimes when she feels like it.”
“In my day, we called that a husband,” Grandma said.
“I’d better go,” I said. “It’s getting late, and I need to get home before Sarah.”
“You worry too much,” Grandma said. “She’s not a little girl anymore.”
“She’s a teenager, which is even more dangerous.”
“Sarah’s not using drugs, is she?” Grandma asked.
“No, she’s just surly. I can’t do anything right.”
“She’ll grow out of it,” Grandma said. “Take her some apple pie. Do you think it’s boy trouble?”
“She says boys are gross,” I said. “I’m happy she believes that for now.”
“So many young girls get in trouble,” Grandma said, as she put half a pie in a Tupperware container. “I’m thankful Sarah’s still a child.” Grandma handed the pie to me.
I kissed her forehead. “I guess I’m overprotective,” I said. “But Sarah is a young fifteen.”
“She doesn’t dress like a young girl,” Grandma said. “At Thanks-giving, she was wearing an outfit that made her look like-”
“A slut,” I finished.
Grandma’s lips tightened into a thin, angry line. “I would never say that about my great-grandbaby. But that short skirt and belly-baring top did make her look older than her years.”
“That’s how girls dress now, Grandma,” I said. “It looks slutty by our standards, but I didn’t want her to be what I was in high school.”
“What? An A student?” Grandma said.
“A nerd,” I said. “Thanks for the pie. I’m sure she’ll love it.”
Grandma followed me to her front door. “Francine, if you need money for anything, you can always come to me. I only have a couple hundred in the bank, but I own this house. It’s not worth much, but the land is valuable. Some developer wants to build another subdivision on this road. He’s made an offer for that lot across the street and my five acres.”
“Thanks, Grandma, but where would you live? You keep your house and your independence.”
“Okay, but the money is yours when you need it. Lawyers are expensive.”