[Day 1 – 14 Days until the Funeral]
Gimi is quiet. Always has been. Today is no exception. Today, on this cool morning, she’s standing at the kitchen window watching the mainland ebb. There’s a wall of warped, dying Douglas Firs and old Sitka’s oscillating ahead, and she sucks on her cigarette until it illuminates her morning-darkened face.
“Gimi?” I ask, barely five feet tall, only just stretching into puberty.
Gimi is one of those old trees across the Strait of Georgia, gently swaying in her house coat. Together, we watch the dead, brown waves eat away at the island. There is only the dull buzz of the radio and the clunk, clunk, clunk of Gramp’s fishing boat taking on water. The rising waves and sinking dock yearn for one another.
“It’s raining,” she says.
It was Gimi’s practice to ascend to her office when it rained. As I sit at the kitchen table, I hear the three-wheeled chair in front of her desk chew at the wood above. And she’d do…something. But I watch Caribou Country on CBC and listen to those wheels trace the floor. During a commercial break, green sheets of rain slick back the British Columbian mainland.
“In a couple million years they’ll just be big hills, like their cousins—the Appalachians,” Gimi says when she returns from upstairs and finishes the tin of peaches she started for breakfast.
“What were you doing,” I ask. She’s emptying tomato soup from a can into a pot. With a click, click, click the gas stove ignites.
“It helps me settle things, “she says.
“Settle what?” I ask, “And what settles you?” I ask again.
And Gimi never answers. She just smiles and tucks her ashy black hair behind her ear, revealing white roots as she does. Licorice roots, still wet with clay and soil.
After lunch, she sleeps/drools on the furniture. I’m watching non-Disney VHS tapes that have that sharp-voiced announcer. And he’s talking about next year’s releases that are now five years gone. When Gimi starts snoring, I climb the stairs and watch her office door. Push in. The hum of the TV echoing through these drafty floorboards and old wallpaper. I’m hunting now, for what settles my grandmother.
There’s an oak desk, chestnut brown, stained with candle wax from consistent use during the rolling blackouts. A leather journal, thrifted, $2.00 sticker half torn off. Half empty bottles, tall, stiff-necked. Empty peach cans. Radio parts. And then the snoring stops, and I’m summoned downstairs for peach candies and goodbyes.
Mom picks me up at noon, loads me into the car with my siblings not yet old enough to spend the weekend. The four of us watch them talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. An argument, I guess. Maybe they’re saying kind words on the other side of the fogging glass. Probably not. Not with their waving arms, sad eyes, their loud words.
But it doesn’t matter. Gimi’s dead to us. Has been for a long time.