Rest Stop
I was five maybe, and all I could do was watch. Don�t go, don�t touch, don�t this, don�t that; but somebody told me to break the rules. Ma said it was bad people and bad influence and that child from next door would never play at our house again with her inappropriate behavior (and later on, when I became �responsible� and such, it was suddenly called us kids fooling around� who�s fooling with who?) � but actually, it was old Nana. To Ma it was Ann Tilson, and to Pa it was Mrs. Tilson, but those were names that old people called each other, so I just called her Nana. It was her who showed me that things were never quite so bad, even after the little fire in the kitchen and the big burn on my hand from �don�t touch the stove when it�s on� and touching it anyway, first with a piece of paper and then when the flames rose, a dirty rag, which only ended up with a dramatic affair and a nasty spanking. And that was even after the new car incident � the day after Ma bought it, she parked on an incline and left me in the passenger seat. I let loose the handbrake, and there I was, rolling down the road and into the side of a truck. Or the leave the fridge open for the whole day on purpose incident, or even the peanut butter episode. As a result, I still hate peanut butter.
Nana would sit on the couch to my left and hold me close while we watched TV (I loved Sarah Polley on Road to Avonlea, and so did she; she also liked the Wheel of Fortune guy, Pat Sajak, though I always thought he hated his job). During the commercials, she�d sometimes get started on some old faded dream that she�d had, while I listened, my head reclining sleepily on her warm shoulder. It would be something wonderful and lovely, like dreams usually are, but they�d invariably drift into real life. Then, it was a beast on the loose, a desperate tale of a marriage gone awry, her kids suddenly spiteful, her job as a department store cashier bringing nothing but pain and a biting sense of futility. She didn�t look for promotions any more, she said. Just not to get fired. An old bag of bones.
I�d never see it the rest of the time. Nana was always smiling and waving at me from the window as the school bus dropped me off for the afternoon; she�d laugh and open the door and give me a big hug. I�d sit in her fuzzy beat-up faux-leather chairs that smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and mildew, and she�d cook me some homemade chicken noodle soup, cut me a warm slice of pie and let me watch cartoons while she smoked cigarettes and hummed to herself. When I asked her, she�d always say the same thing: �It�s better to kill myself my way than let everyone else do it their way.� I didn�t pay much attention to it though, because she liked Darkwing Duck and Bonkers as much as I did.
The day came when she did die, with a cigarette in one hand and the remote control in the other. It was such an empty death, almost formless in my mind � nothing momentous, just some late talk shows blurring into one, a nodding of the head, and a slip and fall into unconsciousness. The paramedics found her on the floor with a gash on the side of her head where she had hit the side of the table. She was alone, they said, and it was quick. Sudden. If she did have any conscious feeling, it was only ten seconds or less. I always wondered what she thought during those ten seconds (my reveries interrupted by the gas light, even with 20 miles to go to the next rest stop): whatever happened to love anyway? I could only picture drywall crumbling, from that constantly unfinished construction site beside my school. I cried, not only because I missed my Nana, but because I wanted her to go some other way instead of alone with just a TV to keep her company in her dark, empty shell of a house, and of a soul. I cried for the crumbling drywall, in pink pieces on the floor of my place of refuge.
I saw Scott the next day, one of her estranged sons. He was carting stuff away from her house before he sold it off, and he wasn�t trying to hide it. Neither was he hiding the fact that he had skipped her funeral, or that he had let his youngest daughter, a heartbreaker, spit in the eye of their Grandma when she came to visit. And even then, she always brought gifts, money, everything she had. It was never enough. As he drove away, his eye caught mine for a second, and for that instance, his gaze dropped as if to say, sorry, kid. You and I both. There�s nothing left of Nana any more but my memories, but even they recede into the skyline, just like everything else on this highway.