Real Live Boyfriends

She was a good grandma to me. Always had peppermints in her bag and bought me monogrammed stationery. She liked to take me shopping at Laura Ashley until I got old enough to put my foot down about that business. When I was younger I used to sleep over at her place when my parents went away for the weekend, and we’d rent old movies together and make popcorn in the microwave. It was Grandma Suzette who introduced me to movies like The Piano and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And before that, to musicals like My Fair Lady and comedies like The Seven Year Itch.

She loved her DVD player, Grandma Suzette.

Too much, probably. She didn’t get out a whole lot, and physically she was something of a mess.

Mom, Dad and I used to drive over there fairly often and take her out to this Italian restaurant where they had unlimited garlic bread. She would take any that was leftover home in a doggy bag.

Anyway, she died of this infection thing. I guess old people do that. Their systems are weak, so they get an infection when a young person wouldn’t, and the infection won’t heal, and their blood goes toxic or something and then they’re just dead.

We visited her in the hospital a few times before it happened, and my throat felt completely closed with tears that weren’t coming out because she looked so bony and gray, like her skin was made of crumpled tissue paper. I told her I loved her and brought her a metal box of peppermints and then it was really hard to know what to say— because she was so sick it just seemed wrong to tell her about my day, and we couldn’t make plans for the future because although we didn’t know she was going to die, it seemed pretty likely at that point, and generally it was just agony.

The last thing she said to me was “I’m going to take a nap now. Don’t drink my orange juice.”

I didn’t drink her juice, but we had to go home before she woke up and thirty-six hours later she was dead.

“Don’t drink my orange juice.”

That was it.

It wasn’t a real goodbye.

It was so unfinished.

I hate it when things are unfinished. When you’re not sure what people meant. Why did she think I would drink her orange juice? I had never tried to drink her orange juice.

Or had I? Drunk some once, back when I was a little kid, and she was remembering that time?

There was going to be a funeral. My sick alcoholic uncle Hanson came up from Portland. He always makes my dad really tense, he’s such a messed-up guy, and he stayed in a hotel but we had to have him over for dinner. He brought his own bottle of whisky and drank the whole thing right in the middle the meal like it was normal. But his mother had just died and it wasn’t exactly the time for an intervention, plus Dad has already talked to him about his drinking like a million times and Hanson never listened. All in all it was a pretty shattering weekend.

The funeral was at this place in Bothell near Grandma Suzette’s condo, and it was surprising how much Bible stuff was in the speeches people gave, given that we’re Christian but we don’t go to church. I was wearing a black dress and a dark blue cotton sweater and sitting in the front row with my parents, but I knew Noel and Meghan and our friend Hutch were in the back because I rode with them to the funeral parlor in Meghan’s Jeep.

I cried at the funeral because people were giving these speeches where they stood up and talked about Grandma. And her friends stood up, these old ladies, and spoke about how much they had loved her and whatever. It was just really sad.

After it was over we all had to drive to the cemetery and I was in the bathroom trying to get my face to stop shining after the tears, putting powder on my nose, when Meghan called in, “They’re making me move my car. Can you get a ride with your parents?”

I said yes, but then when I left the bathroom I couldn’t see my parents anywhere. The area in front of the funeral parlor was a sea of people dressed in black, old women with dyed hair putting their hands on each other’s arms, cousins of my dad’s looking faded and balding, a few little girls running underfoot wearing white tights on chubby legs. I ran outside and looked for our Honda. It was gone.

I didn’t want to get into a car with Hanson so I stood up on the porch and surveyed my options. Who else could give me a ride?

There was Nora Van Deusen. Standing by a hedge and not talking to anyone. There with her hands at her sides, staring into space awkwardly.

Nora.

Nora had come to my grandma’s funeral.

She saw me just as I saw her, and loped over. Nora is five eleven and has tremendous hooters. She was poured somewhat awkwardly into a navy dress that she probably got for church a year ago. It no longer really fit. She was holding a bouquet of white roses.

“Hi,” she said when she got to me.

“Hey.” I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m really sorry about your grandma,” said Nora. “She was such a kind person.” She thrust the flowers into my hands, not meeting my eyes.

Nora knew Grandma Suzette because she and I had been friends from third grade until the end of junior year. You know people’s grandmas when you’re friends for that long. She’d even had sleepovers at Grandma Suzette’s, and the two of us had stayed up late playing with the practically a hundred drugstore lipsticks Grandma had in her bathroom. And freshman year, Grandma took me, Kim, Cricket and Nora to see The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet, even though we were kind of too old for it by then.

“How did you know she died?” I asked.