Though I admired them, I just wasn’t able to dice my family history into slices of a pie chart—50% Italian, 25% Swedish, 7.5% Finnish, 1.25% Cherokee… “As far as I know, I’m just good old-fashioned, Apple-Pie American,” I said, jamming a piece of bacon into my mouth to stay busy.
“American! Bullshit! That’s a continent, not a nation!” She unfolded herself from her chair and made a new approach, stylus extended. “Anybody every mention Moravia? Anybody have an almost superhuman knack for cooking lamb? Anybody do weird things like get a daily newspaper in Slovenian while saying they were from Austria?” Inexplicably, she put both Slovenian and Austrian in air quotes and then went on, “Because that—” she tapped her hooked nose and pointed at my slightly curved one “—is a dead giveaway for something!”
I shook my head and shoveled in a mouthful of eggs, which were delicious. “No, no, and no.”
“Anybody ever plan a coup? Active or passive? Anybody ever sketch out the downfall of an existing government on a paper napkin?”
I choked on my eggs and shook my head, pressing my palm into my mouth. “No to that, too.”
“Your heritage sounds like Yawnsville, hon.”
“Pretty much,” I said, with my mouth still half full.
Grandma ripped open a packet of hot cocoa and filled up her mug partway with the boiling water spigot on the faucet. “Mmmm.”
“I was adopted,” I told her. “So what I know about my adoptive parents has nothing to do with…” Now it was my turn to give some scare quotes. “…my people.”
She narrowed her rheumy eyes at me and fished a tiny sad marshmallow out of Idris Elba’s bathwater. “Adopted,” Grandma repeated, slowly chewing the marshmallow. “So, you could be from…anywhere?”
I nodded vehemently, feeling delighted that I was probably out of the running for a full-on royal heritage examination. Is there a test for royalty? Is it like witches? Is she going to put me in the tub and see if I float? Grandma sighed and dabbed at her nose with a tissue that she produced from inside her sweatshirt sleeve. Desperate for a subject change, I opted to steer clear of Lenin and pointed at her mug. “I’m a fan, too. You know there’s a new season of Luther coming soon? Might even be out now. I could check online if you wanted.”
“I do love me some Idris,” Grandma said wistfully, staring longingly at nothing in particular, it seemed, somewhere in the middle distance. “What a hunk of man he is. Why they didn’t cast him as Bond, I’ll just never know. Fools!”
“And how,” I agreed, thinking to myself, But he’s got nothing on your grandson!
Grandma did look tempted by my offer about Luther, but just as quickly as she looked lured, she redoubled and shook her head. “No, honey. I can’t be watching television this early in the day. It’ll put me into a stupor like an epileptic dachshund. How do you feel about board games?”
The truth was, Not awesome. For the life of me, I could never win a round of Monopoly, and no matter how many times someone tried to teach me chess, it never stuck. But in that moment, I felt better about board games than whatever other plans Grandma seemed to have on tap. Like putting my hair into a potion or something. We were up to our eyeballs in snow, and I figured we’d have to do something to pass the time. “Sounds good to me.”
“Excellent,” Grandma said. She shuffled off to an antique hutch at the far end of the kitchen and crouched down to open a cabinet. She made pained noises as she did and gripped one knee.
“Here, let me help you,” I said, putting down my coffee and going to help her. I knelt and put my hand to her bony back. The air smelled strongly of baby powder, mixed up with Bengay.
“No need, honey! I got it right here,” she said, standing up and beaming. “Maybe we can ask the powers that be about your heritage!”
She gave the box in her hands a shake. And that’s when I saw it.
A Ouija board.
Oh no.
10
Dave
In my whole life, I’d never seen snow like that. Heavy as concrete and with drifts past the tops of the garage doors. I got out the shovel and the snow blower and got to work, yard by painstaking yard. I had no sense of how long it took me to clear a path from the garage to the generator shed, but by the time I got back inside, I saw that shit had taken a serious turn for the worse.
Grandma was standing next to Lisa, with her wrinkly hand on Lisa’s smooth forehead, while on television played reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Lisa stared at me, blinking hard. “Oh, Dave! There you are,” she squeaked. “Hi! Hello!”
Christ. “Gram, you’re freaking her out.”
“No, we’re all good!” Lisa said, her voice high-pitched and panicked and sounding exactly the opposite of all good. “Took us a while to get a…signal?” With this, Grandma nodded slowly, and Lisa looked back at me with even more panic. “But so far, we’ve discovered a man named Stand With Knife is buried underneath the house, and a lady named Jane Gunderson killed her second husband with a cast-iron pan in the kitchen in 1899.” Lisa blinked hard and raised her feet onto anxiously pointed tiptoes beneath her bent knees. “The more you know!”
“But not a goddamned peep about you, honey bunny!” Grandma roared, making a frustrated alphabet soup with the planchette.
Lisa scrunched her eyes shut and sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “Never know what’s coming up next! Third time might be the charm!”
I had to hand it to her. Not every woman could stumble into an alternate reality with so much grace, and I felt somehow proud that, even though I’d only known her a little while, I could read right between her lines to hear her say, Oh my God, help me! I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out, but still. I liked the secret language.
After a couple of long strides, I was prying the planchette out of Grandma Katrina’s hands. “Prude!” she snarled. “No sense of occasion! None!”
“I think you might need a nap,” I told Grandma, looking her in the cataract-clouded eyes.
“You need a nap! And a shave!” Grandma said.
I widened my eyes. Listen, Baroness…
There was a flicker of laughter at the corner of Grandma’s mouth. Hell on wheels. “Fine! All right, fine,” she said and snatched up her iPad. As she padded away, barely picking her slippers up off the wood floors, I heard the ding-ding of an app, followed by her asking, “Okay, Google! How do you test for royalty?”
Lisa snort-snickered as she boxed up the Ouija board, minus the planchette. I took Lisa by the hand and led her into the kitchen. “She’s intense,” she said, ruffling up her hair with her fingers. “I like her. But holy moly!”
I totally got that. As a preemptive measure, I put the planchette on the top shelf of the glasses cabinet, too high for Grandma to reach it even with her mechanical arm. “Did she freak you out too badly?”
Lisa ruffled her hair a bit more. “Naw, nothing a few sessions with my therapist and some hypnosis won’t fix.” She was totally deadpan. Absolutely killed me.
“I’ll pay for it,” I said without cracking a smile.