I went to the street market with my grandmother every Sunday until I turned sixteen, when I didn’t understand her as anything other than grandma and mam, and her big voice felt like Moses splitting the sky to make room for the two of us. We’d see folks from the integrated mill side-hustling their eggs and rutabaga from barrels and blanket tops, the whole thing scented with pig iron and sun. We were never there to shop—my grandmother did not shop. She bartered, which meant I followed her sandaled feet with a bookbag full of our zucchini, a firsthand student at her school of one-sided negotiation. It’s not just zucchini, she’d tell them. It’s bread. It’s pasta. It’s chickenfeed. And she and the vendor would see-saw language back and forth until one of them was yelling, and suddenly I was carrying two jars of pickled plums.
That was who my grandmother was. Stern and floral-coated and thick down to her ankles. She took meanness from the world and pruned its thorns and used the rest to floss her teeth. Growing up, I thought of her the same way I thought about campfires and sheep’s wool, how comfort always seems to come from things that don’t look the part. And my grandmother had a lot of parts—ones that went between fists and spittle down at the Waffle House for $8.35 an hour. Ones that adopted street cats, raised them, warmed their milk, then put them down when time made them feeble. That woman pulled me over her knee and into her arms like they were the same act, as if both were a result of skin and kindness. And that’s how I knew it was real. How every part came from the same whole.
One time, I’d asked her if the vendors were mad at us, because they seemed mad, but then she shook her head and brushed at my cheek with one of her Brillo pad thumbs.
“No, darling,” she said. “We were fair. The trade was perfectly equal.”
For a long time, that was how I’d imagined the world of adults, each person a branch on the same tree, bearing the same fruit, weighing want in equal part so the trunk could stretch nowhere but up. My grandmother was an arbiter of her own heart—she knew it like a callus, and when I was with her, I felt like I could give and take in unison, sparing nothing but our thoughts. It was a silly way to see things, I’ve known that for a long time now, but it was simple, and there’s something to be said about simple things that have a chance of working out.
When I brought my first fiancé home at 21, my grandmother looked at her like a rotting tulip bulb on a stem. We’d met at the wedding of a mutual friend that neither of us was particularly close with. She danced well and hid it. I danced poorly and flaunted it. She drank too little. I drank too much. She thought the bride’s dress was lovely, and I kept my mouth shut. The only thing shared between us was a hotel bed the next morning, but we were beautiful, and I was comfortable, and each of us brought something to the table other than loneliness. I was doing it, after all—I was a part of something impartial, where being together meant being water filling the shape of its container, and I thought that was enough. But sitting in that dining room that day, next to the dust-varnished fan and that Zenith radio my grandmother kept on the countertop, you would think I had dragged Judas screaming from the boiling surface of hell and sat him down in front of her. My grandmother’s eyes were silver pieces falling out of a pocket.
We spent the afternoon building jigsaw puzzles—thousand-piece labyrinths where she skated the frame and its corner pieces, leaving my fiancé and me to navigate the infinite, empty middle. She served my fiancé tuna salad sandwiches with too much mayo and gave her the standard graces, called her sweetie and massaged her shoulders, and the entire time, as they talked, my grandmother’s bones and cartilage became a new language on her jawline, and it all spelled out hate. She even waved goodbye from the porch, idyllic and motherly, until my fiancé was up the driveway and gone. Then she came inside and scrubbed her forehead with a dishrag like she needed to get something off it.
It was only then that I asked her why.
“She isn’t right for you,” she said.
“What’s wrong with her? She’s been good to me.” I told her.
“I didn’t say there was something wrong with her, I said she isn’t right for you. Just because she isn’t wrong doesn’t make her right.”
“Why do you always talk like that?” I asked her.
“Like what?”
“Like you have something else to say. But you never say it.”
“Look, child,” she said, flustered. “Love is the medicine people give when they’re bound to hurt each other. If you don’t have enough of it, you stay sick a long time.”
“Are you calling the love of my life a disease?” I asked her.
“I’m saying there is no one love in your life. You’ll find love in every nook and cranny. You’ll find it in your socks in the morning. You’re gonna live so much life that the love of one of them will never be enough for the rest. That’s why she isn’t right for you.”
We sat in tarred silence for a while after that. One of the oldest cats in the house stalked up to me with its bum eye and fur tongued into a mat and started purring and mopping my flesh with its cheek, and in that moment, I felt absolutely no love in my heart. I felt like a bee landing on stained glass, being taught to follow color my entire life, and realizing too late that the ones I’d found were see-through. She eventually got up and poured herself another lemonade, offering me nothing, and we stopped seeing so much of each other after that.
My fiancée became my wife later that year, my grandmother’s omens huddled like crows on the rafters of our new life. We broke the land-speed record for having a kid and picked up a charming little bungalow on the other side of town. We sat awake late into the night, some nights later than others, trying to understand what we’d created together, to protect it from the things we couldn’t see when our heads were clear. We drove to soccer practice, had jobs we hated, ate takeout twice a week, rubbed each other’s feet, consoled the little deaths we saw in ourselves daily—and through it we loved deeply, like the sinews of a tumbleweed, until one day we woke up, stretched, brushed our teeth, and realized that we felt nothing at all. I remember calling my grandmother that day. It was arid and teeming with summer, and I sat with hot plastic pasted to my cheek, managing somehow to hold it all together until the ringing stopped and she finally said hello.
I cried into the receiver a long time, gnats landing on the wet of my face, and she let me.
A lot of what followed was a haze. It all comes apart in the grip of it—mourning someone that’s still alive, the parts of them you can’t keep. There was a spore of change within me, the kind that makes you check your own shadow to make sure it’s still there. My kid was reaching an age where the obvious answer to a problem was to avoid it, so I stuck to them like a barnacle. Friends consoled me, neighbors pitied me, people from dormant plateaus of my life broke soil and shook themselves clean. I sought my grandmother’s council every step of the way, and she gave it, year after year, until eventually she grew so sage in herself that she forgot my name, then we buried her under a poplar tree that she fed with her bones until it was 100 feet tall and she was finally the size that I saw her in life.
That entire time, I wondered to myself who this person was, my grandmother, and what narrow backroads she must have stumbled through on the map of becoming that made her both steel and silk. If she thought deeply about the world, or floated on its surface like a sponge, sucking and holding its volume until finally, she sank. I found handwritten notes in a little chest she kept tucked away in her bedroom closet when we cleared out the house. Pictures of people I have never met, knick-knacks from journeys kept secret—seashell necklaces and red glass plates and dancing shoes and balsa wood airplanes. A menagerie of the people she had been before, or the person she still was, smothered under the time she’d spent with me.
The longer I live, the more I see of her. In myself, in others, on hot days and the daffodils that break through sidewalk. There’s meanness in me now that didn’t exist before. I close doors too hard. I raise my voice at children playing in the street. At diners, I send my food back when I don’t like it. Living has become a Rolodex of things that have been made to change—their outcomes and the tributaries that lead to them. I think my grandmother may have been a terribly lonely person, the same way a pebble probably feels lonely on a beach, even if everything around it is just more rock ground to nothing with time.
But she was right about one thing—I’ve found love everywhere I went. Love was the sun that turned me olive at the market, where I became a vendor, where I learned people’s names and faces and how to put them together. Me and my persimmons and pawpaws and figs, growing tawny and warm together, ready to give what we had for what others had to give. And they just kept on giving—schoolteachers and scrappers, farmers and bitter old women, people with armfuls of everything, clumsy and ready for more. I remarried over and over again. A new joy, a new loss, there were droughts and downpours of it. The only constant was me, melting and cooling, becoming uglier and more of myself as I filtered out the novelty of feeling.
My kid showed up at the house today with a wife of his own. Spent so long idling in the driveway that I felt unsure if it was him anymore, like he still had half a foot on the gas, looking for a reason to go. Eventually, they stepped out, fog clearing at their feet, and I watched them spin each other into motion, a pair of cogs passing diaper bags and sanitizing wipes and breast pumps and carriers. The new wife held their little one to her chest as she skirted the jagged bits of lawn, and my kid, my own son, kept his eyes at knee-height.
For a moment, everything was a kaleidoscope—bits of my son on the docks by the river water. Bits of my son tweezing grubs from the damp of the yard. Bits of my son tracing the ridges of my palm, small and certain against the parts of me that had hardened to stone. No two memories connect at the same angles anymore, and I think he knows that, the way children always know.
“Sorry, it’s been a while,” he tells me. “Things just get out of hand.”
“It’s a lot,” I say, and nothing else.
We go inside and watch a movie. I serve sweet tea and call her sweetie, give my son the good seat on the couch with the recliner. I half-sit on the barstool by the counter, and between animated flashes of the screen, I sculpt both their faces in my mind until they are marble. They sit far apart, but I can tell they want to move closer, and that I am the sole reason preventing it. It’s always a strange feeling, becoming an obstacle to others—how pity finds ways to walk on air. My son triangulates between the movie and the baby and the wife, and the shape feels so complete that I forget that I’m even here.
I imagine that this, too, is a form of love.
When the movie ends, my son airlifts the little one from his wife’s chest and meanders over to me. He presents her, a girl, like something wrapped in aluminum to be gently, preciously, revealed. I almost mouth to him, she’s good for you. You’re good for each other. This is right and fair and don’t screw it up, but I don’t, and he smiles sadly and nods until I’m nodding with him, and suddenly I know that it doesn’t matter. That he’ll be alright either way.
When I hold my own grandkid now, pudgy and swollen in blankets, I wonder what this mosaic heart of mine could ever do for her. If there’s a way I can flatten the stones of the path she will walk. If she will find the pieces of me worth carrying. If in her heart, they will be sharp or dull, full or porous to the touch. If, to her, I’ll always be the person I am right now, crumpled like paper into a seat, humming, feeling the warm net of her breath on my chin. My grandmother must have been the same way when I was born, caught at the intersections of herself, stemmed somewhere deep by the person she was.
But she was her, and I am me.
I kiss this girl on the head and my lips become a record of things to come—card games and school plays and long afternoons in the sun and phone calls and empty wisdom and days when she forgets I’m around. I look to my son’s new wife, scooching potted plants closer to the window to drink from thin rails of light. I look to my son, crouched by the door, scratching a little old street cat behind the ears until it darts into the garden. The baby rocks, and I become conscious of my fingers, how craggy and stump-ish they’ve become. For the last time, I think about fairness, that lighthouse on the rocky shore spinning on and on into the foggy black, and I softly snuff it out.
I wave at them from the porch until they are up the driveway and gone, and then for a long while after. A wave is a kind of secret that belongs to nobody, a thick flag of skin on the breeze, but in it there’s a greeting, a goodbye, and the space between those two things. The sun tucks into the amber of the trees, gold curling into every possible crease. In those cracks, I see a world where she grows up gentle, where they all grow to be gentle, and it brings me relief, because being together means hurting together, and there never seems to be enough medicine around to treat more than what you can hold in your hands.
I return inside to the easy chair by the phone, sitting long into the night, waiting for a call that tells me that they’ve finally made it home.
Connor Harding
Connor Harding is a fiction writer and graduate of George Mason University's MFA program. His works have been published in Black Warrior Review, HAD, Flash Frog, Crow & Cross Keys, Unstamatic, Bullshit Lit, Barren Magazine, and is forthcoming in BOOTH. He is originally from Youngstown Ohio, and primarily writes stories set in the Midwest.
