Tara Phillips
Grandpa
The phone rings and it’s a little late for a call. I know what it’s about… but hope I’m wrong. The year is 2000. I’m 23 and I’m still married to Frank. We’re living in a single-wide trailer in Valdosta, Georgia near an air base. He answers, hands me the phone and sits next to me with a look of concern and a comforting hand on my leg.
“Hello?” I wait. There’s a pause and clearing of a throat, and I recognize it. It’s my mom. She’s tired and she’s crying.
“Tara, Grandpa died today.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t speak for at least a minute. There’s nothing I can say. I can’t say that I’m sorry, because it’s my loss too. I am sorry that she has lost her father… sorry as hell. But I’ve lost my grandpa too. I can hear her sobbing and I can’t help but join her. She’s my mother and she’s crying, and she doesn’t do that very often. I hate that I’m not there with her, and that I haven’t been there the whole time. I haven’t seen him in months, since long before the diagnosis.
Finally I speak. “When?”
I hear her blow her nose into a tissue and then she tells me what time he died, but I quickly forget because it doesn’t really matter what time. “They were giving him a lot of morphine… he wasn’t in any pain. The cancer was just too aggressive. Maybe if they would’ve caught it sooner…” She chokes a little on her words. It’s hard for her to talk.
“Does Denise know?”
Once again, she answers my question and even a few others, but I don’t remember what the answers are. The conversation isn’t long. My mother is tired and she has things to do in the morning, so I tell her I love her and we say good night.
Frank doesn’t know what to say. He hugs me and lets me cry… kisses my hair. I start to think about the practical things, the obstacles. I begin to panic about school and work and how we’re going to afford two plane tickets to Michigan for the funeral, and can Frank even go with me? I don’t even have anything nice to wear to a funeral, and we can’t afford anything new.
“I can’t miss anymore school. I’ll fail... and if I miss work... we don’t have enough money, and…” Frank stops me, and tells me not to worry… that we’ll figure it all out.
“That stuff doesn’t matter, Baby,” he says in his raspy drawl that sounds like a smoker’s voice but isn’t, and I’m so thankful that he’s with me for this, and relieved when he tells me that of course he’ll go with me, and we can just drive there in our little Nissan Sentra. It might take a couple of days, but we’ll get there, and we’ll be there for the funeral.
It’s a long trip and Frank drives for most of it. We pick up my sister, Denise at an airport on the way… Green Bay, I think. She’s flown up from Mississippi, where she’s stationed. She’s bawling and doesn’t stop much for the last two hours of the trip. I’ve missed her. It’s good to see her, but I wish it wasn’t like this. She’s staring out the side window of the backseat of our car, and she’s silent for a while then, “Tara. Are you awake?” My eyes are closed, but I’m awake. I turn to look at her in the back and she’s smiling a little through puffy eyes and exhaustion. “Remember those frozen Pepperidge Farms cakes he always got us for our birthdays?” I smile and nod my head. He always brought those square layered cakes that must’ve been thawing out at his house all day before he came over. I liked how they were still so cold when we ate them, like ice cream. Sometimes we had homemade cakes too, with candles, but I always preferred Grandpa’s frozen cakes with their white frosting… or brown. It didn’t matter.
The trip is a little rough at the end. It’s February in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Frank can hardly see the road five feet in front of him through sideways blowing snow in the beams of our headlights. If we’re lucky, we’ll get behind another car and use its taillights as a guide, but not too close behind or we’d hit it when it stopped. The roads are mostly ice. It’s late at night, and the salt trucks and plows haven’t been out yet. Frank must be tired, and so am I, but I offer to drive. “I’m okay,” he says. I take his word for it, and close my eyes.
I think about Grandpa… about Erick A. Westman, my mother’s father. I think about how he had fifteen bottles of Heinz ketchup in his pantry because he had found a deal on it at Econo Foods. And how he’d brew a full pot of coffee, but it would last him all week. He’d let it sit cold in the coffee maker, heat up a cup in the microwave and sweeten it with a packet of sugar he saved from a restaurant, smack his lips and say, “Good as new!” I think about all the things I loved about him and how he loved me and all of his kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. How kind he was and how he got such a kick out of animals… cats, squirrels and chipmunks in his yard. He had somehow trained a chipmunk to run up the leg of his denim overalls and grab a peanut out of his hand as he held it there by his knee, calling out in a high pitched chipmunk dinner call, “Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip…” There was always something to eat for the squirrels, and the birds too.
He always had a cat, and he believed in letting his cats come and go as they pleased, but eventually they would go… and never return, killed by a car, a dog or another cat in a lost fight. He vowed one day to never have another cat. “You just get so darn attached, an’ ya miss ‘em when they go away,” he said. He’d finally decided it was a better idea to befriend the local cats by offering them a place to have a snack and hang out. He started by putting cat food on the front doorstep and going out to say hello as they nibbled. He’d stroke their fur and talk to them. Eventually, he’d open the door and let them in. They’d wander in and find a good spot to curl up in his deep grass green shag carpet and take a nap while Grandpa watched TV. An hour later, they’d be on their way. He had three or four of these visitors, and he’d given nicknames to each of them. I wish I remembered what he called them. Sometimes he’d offer them a tiny bowl of half & half from the containers he saved from his latest trip to MacDonald’s.
We pull into the driveway of Grandpa’s house and I open my eyes. I’m not even sure if I’ve been asleep. We get out of the car into the bitter night air, and it’s too cold to stretch our legs. I can smell chimney smoke, I’m shivering and I look at Denise, who has begun to cry again as she looks around Grandpa’s yard at the old Willow trees who have lost their leaves for the winter, and the brick flower bed attached to the front of the house, filled with snow. There’s a light on in the kitchen and I can see my mom. Frank says he’ll get the suitcases. “Go on in. I’ll get these.”
© 2009 Tara Phillips