around.” Her bottom lip pouts outward. Big blue eyes regard me earnestly. It’s hard for the kids to accept the rapid change in Grandma Judy. This is their first real brush with mortality. “I’ll go with you if you really need me to.”
“No, that’s all right.” I continue past the turn-off. There’s no reason to involve Courtney. I’ll run over to Lagniappe after I drop Court at her friend’s.
She’s clearly relieved. “Okay. Thanks for picking me up today, Aunt Aves.”
“Anytime, kiddo.”
A few minutes later, she’s trotting up the driveway to Shellie’s house, and I’m bound for Lagniappe Street and the past.
Blunt-force grief strikes me as I pull into the drive and step from the car. Everywhere I look, there’s a memory. The roses I helped my grandmother tend, the willow tree where I played house with the little girl from down the street, the Cinderella’s castle bay window upstairs, the yawning porch that served as a backdrop for prom photos, the water garden where the multicolored koi bobbed for cracker crumbs.
I can almost feel my grandmother on the Charleston-style piazza along the side of the house. Climbing the stairs, I half expect her to be there. It’s painful to realize that she’s not. I’ll never again come to this place and be greeted by my grandmother.
In the backyard, the greenhouse is stale and dusty smelling. The moist, earthy scents are gone. The shelves and pots have been removed too. No doubt my mother gave them to someone who could use them.
The hidden key is right where it has always been. It catches a beam of late-afternoon light as I remove a loose brick along the foundation. From there, it’s easy enough to slip inside and turn off the alarm. After that, I stand in the living room thinking, What next?
The floorboards crackle beneath me, and I jump, even though it’s an old, familiar sound. Courtney was right. The house seems vacant and spooky, no longer the second home it has always been. From the age of thirteen on, I stayed here during the school year whenever my parents were in D.C., so I could attend classes in Aiken with my friends.
Now I feel like a sneak thief.
This is silly anyway. You don’t even know what you’re looking for.
Photos, maybe? Is the woman on May Crandall’s nightstand in any of the old albums? Grandma Judy has always been the family historian, the keeper of the Stafford lineage, the one who tirelessly pecks out labels on her old manual typewriter and attaches them to things. There isn’t a stick of furniture, a painting, a piece of artwork, or a photo in this house that isn’t carefully marked with its origins and previous owners. Her personal items—any that matter—are similarly stored. The dragonfly bracelet came to me in a well-worn box with a yellowed note taped to the bottom.
July 1966. A gift. Moonstones for first photographs sent back from the moon by American exploratory spacecraft Surveyor. Garnets for love. Dragonflies for water. Sapphires and onyx for remembrance. Custom by Greer Designs, Damon Greer, designer.
Beneath that, she’d added:
For Avery,
Because you are the one to dream new dreams and blaze new trails. May the dragonflies take you to places beyond your imaginings.
—Grandma Judy
It’s strange, I now realize, that she didn’t say whom the gift was from. I wonder if I can find that information in her appointment books. Never a week passed that she didn’t carefully document the details of her days, keeping track of everyone she saw, what she wore, what was served at meals. If she and May Crandall were friends or shared a bridge circle, May’s name will probably be there.
Someday, you’ll read these and know all my secrets, she told me once when I asked her why she was so meticulous about writing everything down.
The comment seems like permission now, but as I pass through the shadowy house, guilt niggles at me. It’s not as though my grandmother has passed away. She’s still here. What I’m doing amounts to snooping, yet I can’t get past the feeling that she wants me to understand something, that this is important, somehow, for both of us.
In her little office off the library, her last appointment book still sits on the desk. The page is open to the day she disappeared for eight hours and ended up lost and confused at the former shopping mall. A Thursday.
The handwriting is barely legible. It trembles and runs downhill. It looks nothing like my grandmother’s lovely, curving script.