smoke is bad for pulmonary tissue. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fine particulate matter. Oh, or you can chew it—you’ve got a good-quality selection there, lots of clear and light-coloured pieces. It’s just tree sap, after all. Boswellia sacra. You can burn the wood too, it smells nice.”
“Is it?” I felt obscurely disappointed. “I thought people like, uh... I don’t know. Made it, somehow. And it was valuable because it was so hard to make. Like, this amazing, rare, secret substance that practically nobody knew how to make. So that’s why it was one of the things the Three Wise Men brought.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“I honestly don’t know. Twelve years of Catholic school and everything gets kinda muddled.”
“Oh, Nicky.” She smiled up at me, tiredly. “God’s not gonna get us out of this one.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t believe in that one,” she said. “I believe in the other ones.”
I smiled back and thought again of her grandma’s funeral. That was the frankincense doing that—the smell of the wood just like the smell of the clear crystals.
Afterwards, when everyone had headed to the church basement for cold lunch, we stayed behind in a back pew. She kept turning over the program, the thick paper muttering against her gloves. Lots of people had worn gloves to the ceremony, and in my teenagery way I had assumed this was a mark of money, just the way rich people mourned. Johnny’s were black lace, a pattern of swirling paisley leaves, closed at the wrists with three crystal buttons.
Leaning back in the pew, I looked up at the roof of the church and the stained glass, the stations of the cross. I hadn’t spent much time in churches, but it had mostly been in this one—a small but tall Catholic church, built in the twenties, solid, high ceiling. The pews had a sweet, cookie-like smell, and were lacquered so thickly that where it had chipped, you could count how many coats they had put on.
I took the program from Johnny’s trembling grip and accordioned it out between our laps.
Joanna Marya Ziegler, 1921—1998. One older photo, one newer, one showing her as new, one as old. I liked the older one, a pretty wartime blonde with an amazing resemblance to her daughter, less to her granddaughter. Bold, movie-star looks—sharp brows, plump lips over a fur-collared coat. The newer photo showed her at some kind of family party, a skinny old lady smiling benevolently at a kitchen table. She had ignored Johnny the few times I’d been in the same room as them—not hateful, it seemed, but disdainful. I was used to it from the rest of her family, so the grandma didn’t seem unusual to me. I assumed that was why Johnny hadn’t seemed too upset. I didn’t know much about grief back then. Or women.
“Did they name you after her, or was that like a huge coincidence?” I said.
“They named me after her. I used to wish they had given me her middle name instead. I thought Marya was so pretty.”
“Meredith isn’t so bad. What’s that, the other grandma?”
“Great-aunt. Dad’s mom’s sister.” She let go of her end of the program and I folded it back up. “We’re not so good on original names in my family. We’re better at recycling.”
“Very environmental of you. Who started calling you Johnny, then?”
“Oh, that was my dad. Ages ago. You know that group, the Waterboys?”
“Nope.”
“They had a song before I was born. ‘A Girl Called Johnny.’ You know, it was about Patti Smith and it was supposed to be kinda sad—but my dad liked it. And later he told me a Joanna is a big lizard, like they have in Australia, not a little girl.”
“Oh, yeah. Like in that movie. Joanna the goanna.”
“Yeah. She—Grandma, I mean—she hated it when people called me that. I mean it wasn’t just that it had been this big deal when they gave me her name, but that my nickname was a boy’s name, she just hated that. Very big on traditional gender roles and performance. And she hated... she just hated things about me. Not disliked. Hated.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean we thought of you as a boy. It’s just a song. Sheesh.”
“I know. It’s without meaning and weight. It’s just who I am, that’s all. Not her. Never her. Just me. Always.”
She took another breath, as if to continue, and burst into tears. I popped her purse open and got out a pack of