Grandma Ada died two months ago, and we buried her just as summer turned into fall. Now the leaves are gone from the big cottonwoods along the creek that runs past the road into town, and light coming in over the mountains is gray. Mom and I are going to clean out her house. She’s been gone long enough for that now, I guess.
All through the long, silent drive, I’m thinking of what I’ll see when we arrive. Grandma Ada lives—lived—in a big brick house off Main Street, with a tangle of rosebushes in front and a big orchard out back. When I went to see her for the very last time, her roses were blooming red and she was sitting in her rocker, awake enough to tell stories. Now she’s out next to Grandpa Will in the little town cemetery off Highway 12, and the only roses around are the plastic ones I put on her grave.
I stare out the window and try not to glance over at Mom in the driver’s seat. I used to get so excited whenever we crossed the bridge over the creek and could see town. That was when I had something to look forward to.
Mom and I pull up to the house and park in the driveway. I don’t want to get out of the car. The front yard is all thorny dead rosebushes and dead grass and piles of dead leaves burying the front step. The windows are blank and dark and empty. I sigh. I slowly open the car door, and just as slowly, step out into the chill of the yard. I scuff my shoes through the leaves, not looking up.
Mom unlocks the front door, and we go in. It is as cold inside as out, and the air smells of dust and neglect. The geranium Grandma Ada used to keep near the window in the hall is nothing but dry stems, and its leaves have fallen on the carpet. I glance at the hall table where Grandma Ada’s wedding photo used to be. It’s a black-and-white print of her and Grandpa Will standing in front of the Salt Lake Temple with white clothes and newly-married smiles, and it’s gone just like she is. We took it to display at her funeral, and no one put it back.
Mom runs her fingers through her short, red hair and sighs, “What a mess.”
I lift my eyes from my shoes, and look around at the dusty kitchen, the stacks of paper on the counter, the sack of cat food spilling over the floor.
“I’ll go work on the basement if you’ll sweep up and start wrapping the china. I’ll go through the papers later,” Mom tells me.
I don’t move. The silence stretches out.
She looks at me again. Her eyes are tired. “Mina…”
I don’t say anything. I go out again into the barren yard and get the boxes and broom from the car.
Sitting cross-legged on her linoleum floor, I start pulling Grandma Ada’s teacups out of the cabinet and wonder where she is now. At her funeral, the bishop got up and said the usual things about her being in a better place and how we ought to live righteously enough to meet her there. I spent half of that talk biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry. Sometimes I miss my faith. It would have eased her loss the way a light jacket dulls November wind, not enough but better than nothing. But it is gone now—my faith—and the cold of this house sinks deep into my bones.
It shouldn’t be taking me this long to wrap teacups. There aren’t many of them, not really. Grandma Ada used her fine china every day. She did not save it for the best the way the other ladies did, so half the set is broken by now. At this point, I have stopped pretending to do anything but stare into space at that familiar cherry-blossom pattern. Grandma Ada made me hot chocolate in those cups every night I was here. She would microwave the water for a full three minutes, then dump a packet of Nestle Hot Cocoa into the teacup and stir. I felt like a princess then, little me with my cocoa-stained mouth and that elegant cup in my hand. Though I do not suppose princesses drink Nestle.
Mom would come into the kitchen then, from wherever she’d been, and make herself a cup. She was always at her funniest at Grandma Ada’s. She’d act out the stories she told me as we drank, gesturing with her cup at imaginary figures and giving different voices to each character in her head. Then my eyes would begin drifting shut, and Mom and Grandma would talk. I remember half snippets of the things they would say, gossip about the rest of the family and memories of long ago.
A few days after Grandma Ada died, Mom and I came here to clean out the fridge and shut off the water. The kitchen was a wreck. Grandma Ada had been using the same plates every day, barely washing them, until the food was caked on hard as stone.
I wish I had been there for her. I should have been.
After a minute, I hear footsteps, Mom coming up the stairs. “How’s it coming?” she asks. Her clothes are dusted with cobwebs from the basement, and her forehead wears the same tired lines that have been there since this summer.
I shrug a little. “There’s not many left.”
She glances down at the teacup I’m holding. “Your grandma used to make me hot cocoa in those cups every night when I was a child, just like she did for you.”
I sigh. My throat hurts now, like I’m going to cry. “I know, Mom. I know.”
For a minute I think she’s going to hug me, but she doesn’t. She hesitates, just for a second, and then she goes back downstairs.
Mom and I argued last summer, two days before I went back to college. I had turned nineteen, old enough to go preach the word of a God I was no longer sure I believed in. I don’t want to be Mormon anymore, I told her. I’m not sure I can be. She cried, and I hated that. I’d heard my mother swear before, but I barely ever saw her cry. It meant there was something wrong in the world, and maybe, that that something was me.
When the world breaks, it all breaks at once. Grandma Ada died barely a month after Mom and I had our argument. We barely talked to each other at the funeral, and I haven’t gone back to visit since. A gap exists between us now, one neither of us knows how to bridge. We do not know what to do with each other anymore.
The kitchen is done, and I drift through the house like a ghost. On the landing I find a pair of my grandma’s slippers; in the bathroom, her cheap plastic hairbrush is still filled with wiry gray strands. There is frost on every upstairs window. I wipe it away and look down at the leafless apricot trees below.
The tiniest apricot tree, the one in the corner of the yard, was Grandma Ada’s birthday tree. I picked it out for her when I was eight, at the Co-Op Nursery out in Orem. Mom drove me there and let me explore all throughout the nursery until I had decided between the varieties Royal Blenheim and Flavor Giant. I found a tree that was, in my eight-year-old eyes, entirely free of blemish. We took it to Grandma Ada’s backyard, where she oohed and awed.
Grandma Ada picked out the perfect spot to plant it in, and Mom helped me dig the hole. I remember all of us there in the backyard, Mom and I with shovels, and Grandma Ada cheering us on from her lawn chair. I remember the dirt under my fingernails, and the way I could not stop looking from the tree to Grandma Ada to Mom and back again. It was, I think, the most thought I have ever put into anyone’s birthday present.
I had remembered her birthday wrong, as it happened. I used to mix up June and July. But Mom baked a cake that evening—lemon cake with vanilla frosting, Grandma’s favorite—and dug a box of candles out of the basement, and we celebrated just the same. Neither of them ever told me I was wrong.
I go back down the stairs and into the living room. Mom sees me looking at the photo of Grandma Ada on the mantel.
“We’ll be with her again someday, Mina.” She makes her voice light, but it comes out wrong. Pretending nothing has happened does not make it true, for either of us. “I bet she has a lot to say to Grandpa Will after all this time.”
We’ve had this talk before. I shake my head. “I keep thinking about Grandma’s funeral, Mom—how it was Cousin Albert who blessed her grave when we buried her.”
She looks at me. She doesn’t understand, but she hears the note in my voice. “We’re lucky he could come, Mina. He’s usually busy that time of year.”
All my words come out in a rush. “He didn’t even know her, Mom. I never heard Grandma mention him in her whole life. It should have been you blessing her grave. It should have been you, because you loved her more than he did, and they wouldn’t let you, and they won’t ever let you. Just because you’re a woman. And I just—I can’t do it. Not anymore. Not ever.”
Mom shakes her head. “I’ve never wanted the priesthood, Mina. I don’t know why things are set up the way they are, but I believe God knows what’s best for us.”
It isn’t whether Mom wants the priesthood—or even whether Cousin Albert wants the priesthood—that matters to me. It’s that Mom could not hold it, even if she did want to, and I cannot either. I think of the two of us standing, silent, at the side of Grandma Ada’s grave. I don’t know how to tell her why I cannot believe anymore. I do not know how to show her what I know but cannot explain.
When Mom and I came here just after Grandma Ada died, there was an open box of Lipton black tea on her kitchen counter. Mormons aren’t supposed to drink tea. It was a tiny secret I’d never known about her. I wonder, sometimes, if she would have understood how I feel about the Church, if I would have been telling her something she already knew. I slipped the tea into the trash before Mom could see it. I didn’t want her to know.
I look back at Mom and force my eyes up to meet hers. I do not want to argue with her again. I do not want to be here in this skeleton of a house. “I used to believe that too, Mom. But I don’t now. I told you before.” Before, I had thought she might understand. I was wrong.
I expect her to argue with me, but she doesn’t. She sighs and looks away. “I know, Mina. I know.”
We stand there in the living room for a long minute, neither one looking at the other. The space between us is measurable, as wide as it has been since last summer. I have nothing left to say.
The day stretches out, endless. I vacuum the carpets, all of them, and scrub off all the hard-water rings around the sink in the upstairs bathroom. The bathroom still smells like her Dove Silver shampoo, light and floral. I find $2.68 in change and a turquoise-handled pocketknife underneath the cushions of the couch, along with enough crumbs to feed an army of mice. I see a thousand things that remind me of her, and I try not to cry.
We bring load after load of odds and ends out of the house—bags of trash that we’ll drop off at the dumpsters on our way out of town, cases of canned food Grandma Ada kept for emergencies that never happened, stacks of old bills, and the boxes of china I wrapped up earlier this morning. We have been cleaning all day, and the sun is beginning to set.
Finally, we are done. I walk through the house again, pretending to look for anything I might have missed. The house is barren. I look at each room and remember how it was, how I wish it still could be. I turn out the lights and watch shadows stretch across the floor.
Mom meets me in the hall, and we go outside. She closes the door and turns her key in the lock. I hear that little sound, and I know it is for the last time. Grandma Ada is gone. She is not coming back here, and neither are we. The house will be sold before summer, and there will be nothing left.
I do not know which one of us starts crying first, Mom or me. She hugs me, and I hug her back. Neither of us wants to let the other go. We stand there together, on that freezing porch, until the moon comes up.
