“It’s Jimmy?” Grandma asked incredulously.
“My voice cracked,” she revealed, then continued. “I thought it impossible. How could it be Jimmy? How could they be standing there on my doorstep on Christmas morning with the Christmas tree lights glowing in the front room, the presents under the tree, waiting to be torn open and tell me, “It’s Jimmy.”
She looked at each of us and lamented, “It was supposed to be Mrs. Brumfield”.
It was like the grim reaper standing on her doorstep. Her doorstep! On Christmas morning! “How unfair,” she pronounced indignantly.
Grandpa Jimmy had been hit by a train while driving home from work. The train smashed headlong into his car and carried it forward five hundred feet. Car parts scattered, his dentures were found three hundred feet up the track. Grandma was comforted somewhat by the fact that he was killed instantly.
She always said of Grandpa Jimmy – just as she had said of Grandfather Earl, “He didn’t want to leave us. And, that’s all I know.” Her conclusion that Jimmy Huff wouldn’t want to leave her caught me off guard. With the way she was and all, she would have been a handful for any husband. My mother often said that Grandpa Jimmy was the only buffer that she had when grandma would roam the house, ranting about my mother’s imagined transgressions.
After the funeral my grandmother refused the many offers my parents extended that she come come live with us saying she preferred living in Ohio and being close to her husbands. She did come out to the west coast to visit us from time to time, although quite a bit of tumult resulted. Put simply, she drank.
My mother would say, “Who can blame her?” Coming out to visit was difficult but, for some reason, a necessary ritual for her and my mother. Grandma would start drinking most afternoons. With my parents still at work, a taxi cab would bring a bottle of rye whiskey out to our house. My grandmother would walk down our driveway and meet the cab. She would signal for the driver to open the passenger side window and he accommodated her by stretching across the front seat. Grandma would lean into the cab, take a long draw from her cigarette, and blow smoke rings into the cab. God only knows what was on her mind, or what kind of impression she was making, and she didn’t seem to care. She unfolded the dollar bills one by one, paying for the fare – and the bottle. After trading jokes with the cab driver, she’d walk back up our driveway, returning to the guest apartment downstairs ‘to sip’ until my mother came home from work.
Mom was never pleased to find her own mother in ‘a state’ on those particular afternoons. The accusations would fly over my grandmother’s drinking and my mother’s transgressions as a teen-ager. This stage of the evening would be followed by taunts, escalating into screaming. Then the tears flowed, followed by who was to blame that grandma was twice widowed. It had to be someone’s fault that both husbands had died. But whose? One some days, she seemed not able to bear it at all. My father had been the only one capable of calming my grandmother after Grandpa Jimmy died, and so he tried to reason with her now
Her scenes upset life – long after she packed up and returned to Ohio. Like her very last visit. Her departure had been filled with recriminations toward my mother for leaving Ohio in the first place. She wanted to impress upon my mother how it felt to be left behind, so she slammed the front door for emphasis as she drug her suitcase out to the car where my father was waiting to take her to the airport. My father was joined by my sister and baby brother, leaving my mother and me to reflect on the emotional din she had left in her wake, not counting the broken dishes.
Mother was downstairs in the basement straightening the guest apartment and trying to restore order to at least the objects in our house. I was upstairs in my room when I heard her shout my father’s name.
#Free! "That's All I Know" from the #book ~ Ghost Chaser's Daughter
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