CHAPTER NINE
I get a very strange call in April. It’s a Sunday, near the start of the month, when it’s still pretty cold in Michigan—colder than usual this particular year. What warmth that does come only turns the frost outside to a loose, brown mush that steals your shoe if you happen to step in it. I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, and Dad’s there reading a book on Benjamin Franklin. The phone rings. It’s Mom. My heart jumps when I see her name on the caller ID box. We haven’t spoken in ages, way longer than usual.
I pick up. And then, just like she’s telling me the weather, Mom says, “Your grandmother is dead.”
I say, “Oh my God, Grandma Andrews?”
“Yes, Derek.”
“When?”
“A week ago. She’s already in the ground.”
I say, “Excuse me?”
But I heard her right. My grandma died, and Mom didn’t even tell me.
“How did it happen?”
“She was old.”
I say, “I thought she was in her sixties?”
“Sixty-five is old.”
Trying to get more information out of my mom is like taking a crack at Fort Knox. She won’t budge.
I say, “Why didn’t you tell me? I should have been at the funeral.”
She says, “This hasn’t exactly been easy for me!” Then she slams down her phone, just like that.
I set my own phone down extra delicately.
From the look on my face, Dad says, “What happened?”
“Grandma Andrews died.”
“Oh, Christ,” he says. He kicks himself out of his chair. “Come on, I’ll take you to the airport.”
I shake my head. “They already buried her. I wasn’t invited.”
He’s still standing, and he shifts on his feet for a moment like he can’t tell for sure what to do. “Well, come on anyway,” he says. “Let’s go for a drive.”
Despite the fact that it’s thirty degrees outside, we get ice cream cones from Dairy Queen, then we head out onto the country roads east of town and just keep driving. The roads stretch on along open swatches of farmland, with cornstalk stubs in frozen rows of frosty, brown-gray mud. Soon, even the roads are made of dirt, and Dad drives slow. I think it’s the first time he’s really had to think about Mom in at least a couple months.
“It’s sad,” I say. “I never knew her, but it’s still sad.”
Dad just nods.
I say, “How come Mom is so weird about her parents?”
“You’ll have to ask her that yourself.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because I don’t know, Derek. I didn’t even meet them until you were born—your mother wouldn’t invite them to the wedding.”
“But why not?”
“Derek,” he says, “I really don’t know.”
* * *
It takes a week before I cry. I stay mostly in a state of confusion over things, more frustrated than sad. It isn’t until I’m in school, a Monday morning, and Miss Hyatt sends a note to my Spanish teacher to call me to her room.
Miss Hyatt doesn’t have class third hour, so it’s just her in the room when I get there. She says, “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
I say, “Give me the bad.”
She shrugs toward Darwin and DaVinci’s tank. “DaVinci died over the weekend.”
I look at the tank, and, true enough, there’s Darwin, just sitting by herself in the tank like even she is aware that now she’s alone. That’s about all I can take. The tears well up in me, and I just start bawling. “Why is this happening now?” I say.
She rubs my back. “It’s alright,” she says, “DaVinci was four—that’s a ripe old age for a rat.”
“No,” I say, “it’s not DaVinci. It’s just, my grandma just died, and now this.” I start crying harder.“Why does everything keep dying on me?”
Miss Hyatt doesn’t know what to do with me. She just keeps patting my back until I calm down. She says, “I guess this isn’t the best time for the good news.”
“No,” I say, “what is it?”
“Our paper on microbe evolution, it’s been accepted for publication.”
I smile. My face must be red like crazy. “Next time, give me the good news first.”
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I will.”
* * *
Easter approaches and, with it, spring break. I fly to Florida feeling weird about seeing Mom. She’s been awkward on the phone since she told me Grandma died. At the airport, she’s equally awkward, and she looks awful, like she’s just been a wreck for weeks and weeks. As soon as we’re back at her house, she collapses into her bedroom and won’t come out. She stays like that all day.
Easter Sunday, I make eggs in the morning and attempt to bring breakfast to Mom in her room. She won’t eat it, though, and she won’t talk to me. “You have to eat,” I say. “You look like you haven’t had a meal in days.”
“Honey,” she says—she talks from her stomach, with her face in her pillow— “just leave me alone.”
It’s so bad, I resort to calling John. He’s number one on the speed-dial in the kitchen. Go figure.
I say, “I hope I’m not interrupting your Easter.”
He says, “Naw, I’m a heathen like your mother.”
I ask if he’ll come over, and in an hour he’s pulling up the driveway in his little red pickup truck. He tries coaxing Mom from her bed. He tries even harder than I do, and still it’s no use. She won’t budge. Finally, he gives up, shutting the door to her room, and he just shrugs at me. He motions for me to follow him outside to the front porch.
John pulls out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” he says.
“No thanks.”
He lights one for himself.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why is she acting like this?”
John says, “Death is hard on people.” He holds his cigarette like he’s studied a lot of John Wayne movies.
“Did she even go to the funeral?” I say.
He nods. “I took her myself.”
And then I get an idea that’s awful—because I know he’ll have to say yes, despite what a terrible favor it is to ask. “Would you drive me there?” I say. “To her grave? Right now?”
He only hesitates a second. “Get in the truck.”
* * *
It’s a four hour drive to Miami from St. Pete. Four hours with a man I barely know, to tell the truth. He drowns the silence out with his stereo—a mixed CD of 70s rock songs that seem a little too old even for someone John’s age. When the disc ends, he starts it from the beginning, again and again, until the drive is over. We hear the whole disc six times.
Grandma is buried in the northern part of the Miami, not far off I-75. John pulls into the cemetery. He parks his truck along the side of the drive and points me toward the grave.
“Back there,” he says. “Almost to the corner.” He stays in his truck while I walk to the grave.
I imagine it should be cold when you visit a cemetery. That’s just how it’s supposed to be—it’s supposed to be cold and gray. But it’s eighty degrees in Miami, and bright, and muggy as hell. That just makes it surreal. That just makes me want a hole of my own, so I can crawl down in it and die there.
Grandma Andrews’s only giveaway is the headstone. There’s already sod covering over the dirt, and it’s had enough time to root in. It’s just the headstone that gives her away—it’s newer than its neighbors, without so much as a single chip worn off the edges of the lettering.
ADRIAN ANDREWS
June 17, 1937 – March 29, 2003
LOVING MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER
There’s nothing more. It’s a very simple headstone, carved in gray granite. It’s strange that her tombstone is so blank. It’s like, I hardly know anything about her—and that’s just what got put on her tombstone.
I haven’t got anything to leave at the grave. I just rub my fingers over the stone, say my goodbyes, and try not to think too hard about what really lies six feet below me. Some blue-haired lady I can’t even picture just rotting away to bones.
I slink back to John’s truck. He says, “All set?” I nod.
We’re rolling again. I say, “John, how did my grandma die?”
He says, “She was old.”
I say, “People don’t die of old age at sixty-five.”
“Some people do.”
“Did you ever meet them?” I say. “My grandparents. Back when you and my mom were dating?”
“Nope.”
“So you don’t know where my grandpa lives?”
He says, “Your momma and I didn’t date that long before she left me for your daddy. I never met her folks.”
That shuts me up for awhile. But then it starts to bug me. I say, “I thought my mom left you before she met my dad.”
He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “We were still living together. She ran away in the middle of the night.”
* * *
Mom stays all but comatose the rest of my week in Florida. Why exactly that is, she’s not saying. John’s not saying. Nobody is saying, so why should I care?
Wednesday night, with three days left to go before my flight home to Michigan, I do something I never did before—I call my dad from Mom’s house. He picks up sounding bewildered.
“Sharon?”
“No, it’s me.”
“Oh,” he says. He sounds really relieved. “What’s up?”
I tell him I just called to talk. You’d think I told him something in Greek.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just talk,” I say. “It’s lonely here. Just talk to me.”
So we do. We talk, I don’t know, maybe five minutes. That may be a record for us. I don’t tell him about visiting Grandma—or about Mom being stuck in her bed. I sure as hell don’t tell him a word about John. I just ask him about the weather and say, “It’s really hot down here. It’s awful.”
“That so?” he says. “It’s cold as hell up here.”
“I know, Dad. I was just there.”
He says, “Oh. Right.”
And then I say, “Did I tell you? That paper I helped Miss Hyatt with, it’s getting published.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not,” I say.
And then he goes on and on. Why didn’t I tell him sooner? And, wow, he’s really proud. And now I’ll get accepted at Michigan for sure now.
I say, “That’s a long way off, Dad.”
“No it isn’t,” he says. “You’ll see.”
End of Serial Number Nine. Chapter Ten is coming on September 6th.
Previous Chapters:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Ryan K. Jory was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan, where he began
writing at the age of nine. The Orange Story, written while a master’s
student at Miami University of Ohio, is an adaptation of his Hopwood
Award-wining short story, “The Messenger Orange.”













