wishes I could play, but I can never quite get the hang of it,” Donald’s grandmother said. His grandmother was more the bridge type. When her bridge club met at her house she let us bring out the lunch plates. “Your grandson is quite the gentleman,” one of the ladies said once, and Donald got all pink but it was true.
“I didn’t expect Donald’s mother to be blond,” I said when we got home, and my mother snorted.
“She needs her roots done,” she said, hanging up my father’s suit.
“I feel bad for him,” I said. “He really really loves his grandmother. He talks about his grandmother and grandfather all the time but he hardly ever talks about his mother.”
My mother sat on the edge of the bed. She looked sad, suddenly, and tired, instead of mad the way she’d been since Tommy’s news. There were marks around the edge of her feet where her dress shoes pressed in, like watermarks on a boat.
She took hold of both my hands. “The next time you see Donald, you tell him, I know how much your grandma loved you. That always makes people feel better, hearing that. And in his case it’s true, too. That woman loved him to pieces.”
“I know how much your grandma loved you,” I repeated.
“That’s right,” my mother said.
But I didn’t get to do that because I didn’t have a real conversation with Donald again for close to ten years, and then it was in the middle of a busy city intersection and those words had gone right out of my head.
My aunt Ruth asked about the funeral when I brought her her dinner. “Meat loaf,” she said, and she didn’t sound pleased. She never sounded pleased about beef noodle casserole or chicken à la king, either, but she did seem to perk up at pork chops and ham. I guess she was a pig girl. Her parents had had some pigs, and a goat named Buster that got hit by a truck and died, but not before doing a good amount of damage to the truck. Whenever she talked about her childhood, my aunt talked about Buster and how he would follow her around like a dog, mouthing the skirt of her dress gently.
“That goat smelled to high heaven,” my mother always said, but not in front of Aunt Ruth because the two of them were hardly ever in the same room. When they needed to communicate with one another, they did it through me. Get your mother to have new heels put on these shoes. Tell your aunt not to put the heat on so high. Tell your mother those beans were tough as rubber bands. Let your aunt know she can go hungry for all I care.
My mother scarcely ever went to the little house behind ours where my aunt Ruth lived, and my aunt Ruth never left the house. I knew there had to have been a time when she did, because she’d gone to the high school and been sort of engaged, once, to a boy in her class who went to Italy during World War II and came back with a war bride. “Aunt Ruth’s heart was broken when her fiancé came home with a wife,” I said one night lying on the sofa after dinner, and my mother snorted loudly as though she’d never heard anything so foolish in her life. It was the way she’d snorted when my father had come home drunk one night from the Elks and recited a poem in the front yard. “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,” he shouted, and my mother stood in the doorway snorting.
“Pop, you’re embarrassing yourself,” Eddie had said, standing behind her.
There was a part about the smithy not owing anyone anything, and my father started to cry, and then he sat down in the dirt and Eddie brought him inside. “Leave him on the couch,” my mother had said. “I’m not sleeping with him in that condition.”
I was the closest thing my aunt Ruth had to the outside world. I dropped off her movie magazines and before I ate my own dinner I brought hers back to the tiny house down the driveway, where it stopped being paved and turned into a gravel path. My father plowed all the way back to Ruth’s house on snowy days and shoveled out the narrow overgrown walkway to her front door, which always seemed like a waste of time because Ruth