A plate of doughnuts

Gramma coughed a lot those days. I guess we all did, but I remember her most of all. She’d always be hacking into her handkerchief, and when she finally made it through one of the bad fits, her cheeks would look hollow and her eyes sunken. She was only in her sixties, but something in those terrible coughs left her looking ancient. I could see her deteriorating.

Gramma is what I remember most about that last day.

I remember her hands shaking. She was making her way around the table, placing the knives and forks. I remember the fat, purple veins on top of her hands, and I remember them shaking. It was my job to set out the napkins and water glasses and fill the pitcher, so we were both circling the table slowly.

She clanged the last knife and fork in Mom’s place and fished in her pocket for the rag. She blew her nose and then began coughing. I was eleven, and I marvel now looking back at how oblivious I was to what was going on, but this I noticed. The coughing.

My father stepped into the room. “Mama?”, he said to Gramma. She just waved him off and kept right on coughing.

I heard my mother coughing in the kitchen. Not as violent as the fit that was sending Gramma to the living room where she put her hand on the couch arm and doubled over. My dad went in there with her, his hand on her back. He looked back at me, and he looked scared.

“Get some water, Santi.”

I dropped everything and ran to the back door before I realized I needed to get the pitcher from the kitchen.

Mom had her hand on the counter, doubled-over in almost the same position as Gramma on the other side of the house, but I just grabbed the pitcher and went out. I pulled the rag I always kept looped around my neck like a scarf up over my nose and mouth, but the smoke was thick in the afternoon and I felt a little cough coming on immediately. I still couldn’t get used to how hot it could be out here. The sun was a faint orange disc behind the grey curtain. How could its heat sneak through? But it’s a good thing it did, somehow. I hurried to the center of the yard and found that the distiller was still working. Dad had been worried for months that the smoky skies would block out the sun so that it wouldn’t have the power to evaporate the water, then collect the vapor on the sloped glass and catch it, drop by drop, in the pan at the bottom when it rolled down the glass. I opened the spout and I could see that there was just enough to fill the pitcher, but that wasn’t going to be enough to get us all through the rest of the day and tomorrow.

Once I got everything out I could get, I turned to run inside.

But I was so stupid. As I was hurrying through the door, I banged the pitcher on the door frame. The glass handle came right off in my hand and the vessel smashed into two big pieces. All the water went on the floor.

Gramma looked up at me from the living room, tears streaming down her face, still coughing.

“I’m so sorry!”, I shouted, desperate. “I’m so sorry!”

The look in Gramma’s eyes—she wasn’t the nicest person I’d ever met. She had a way of being angry and complaining about how everyone was incompetent these days. She’d never been mean to me, but the look in her eyes at that moment seemed to blame me for sending her to her death.

Dad gasped, looking at me.

“It’s okay, Mama. We have more.”

“It’s empty, Dad,” I said, gesturing toward the back yard.

“Come with me to the car,” he responded without missing a beat.

I didn’t know what he meant, but he grabbed a metal drinking bottle and funnel and went out. When he opened the trunk, I saw the three five-gallon jugs we had been keeping in the hall closet. Those were our reserves. We filled them little by little every day all summer because Dad was so worried, but we never had to use any of it yet. It was untouchable. But, of course, this was exactly what we were saving it for. In that moment, I was grateful for Dad’s foresight because it saved me from the guilt for losing our last bit of water.

The city water had been unreliable since June. Some days we’d have a trickle, most days none, and when we did have it, Dad said we couldn’t drink it without distilling or boiling. Except that boiling took a lot of energy, and we didn’t have a reliable source of that, either. The city grid was completely down and the neighborhood microgrid, which only operated off nearby solar, was only generating anything usable during peak sun, and then only weakly.

The world was falling apart. I knew that somewhere deep down, but I never put it all together into a clear picture and told myself, “soon this will all be gone.”

We knelt behind the car. Dad hugged the jug with both arms while I positioned the funnel and bottle so that he could pour without spilling anything.

Back inside, we filled a glass for Gramma, who had finally stopped coughing and flopped down on the couch. We also gave a glass to Mom, and then we went out to fill the bottle again. Dad said he didn’t want to bring the jug in the house because we were gonna leave tonight.

“Where are we going?”, I asked. But he didn’t answer. He just kept concentrating on the jug and the funnel and the bottle.

“We’re leaving,” he said when he was done.

And I half-understood. I understood that the decisions was made, but I failed to understand what it meant.

Like solar distillers and the microgrid, solar cookers didn’t work that great when the skies were full of smoke, but Mom said they were still pretty good for slow-cooking. She put the pot in the center of the dining room table and we all sat down.

Gramma had been resting in the living room, and Dad went to help her over to the table. She looked like a skeleton, and I thought she was still mad at me, but she looked me in the eye and just sort of swallowed, or something. I don’t know what it was, but she somehow told me she wasn’t mad at me.

So, we all sat down and I peered into the pot to see what we were having. It didn’t look great. It seemed to be potatoes, black beans (not my favorite beans), and wheat berries. I was old enough to remember the old days, when we had plenty of water and energy and when the grocery stores still had fresh tortillas and veggies filling up the shelves from floor to ceiling. So, to me, this was depressing, but the twins were only five, and I figured it was for their benefit that Dad folded his hands and mumbled thanks to God for the bounty. Alexia was seated to my left and Daniel to my right. I always sat between them so they wouldn’t fight at dinner.

We sat there for an unusually long time with only the sound of forks scraping the plates and the twins making their little noises, talking to each other, humming some insufferable song. Mom and Dad weren’t saying anything.

It stayed that way until Dad cleared his throat.

“We.” He stopped there, though. A full stop, and looked at Mom. But then Gramma started coughing again. Another bad one. Mom and Dad got up to help her into the living room. I hadn’t realized it until this moment, but that was sort of Gramma’s coughing room. It seemed like she always went in there when she had a rough fit.

The twins and I stayed in the dining room, and they kept eating. I didn’t want to stop them because at least eating kept them from bickering, but it seemed wrong to keep eating while Gramma was ten feet away, suffering.

“Do you need anything?”, I asked.

“No thanks, honey,” Mom responded.

When Gramma finally stopped coughing, they all stayed in the living room for another couple of minutes.

“Let me rest for a little,” Gramma said. “You go and eat.”

Mom and Dad came back, sat down, and looked at each other, then looked at the twins, who were still picking at their plates with their forks, kicking their feet from their chairs, and making silly little noises.

“Alexia. Daniel.” Mom sounded serious, but they didn’t pick up on it. I tapped them each on the arm, and they looked up at me simultaneously. I jerked my head toward Mom and Dad at the opposite side of the table, and they both got the hint.

Dad cleared his throat again.

“We.” Again. A full stop. He stretched it out, too, like he hadn’t had a chance to figure out what to say in the past fifteen minutes since he said the same thing and stopped.

“We’re leaving,” Mom finally said.

“We’re leaving home. Tonight,” Dad added. “We might never come back.”

This last part was new to me. And it was not easy to hear.

The twins just sat there. They looked at me like I was gonna smirk and reveal that this was a joke.

Gramma sat up on the couch. She coughed, but just a short, easy one.

“Where are we going?”, Daniel asked. He actually sounded hopeful, like Dad was gonna say, “We’re moving to Disneyland.” Disneyland had shut down months before.

“There’s a farming town up north called Madera,” Mom said. I remember she said it sadly. Like, that was the saddest part so far. Maybe because she knew we’d take it that way.

“Are we gonna own a farm?”, Alexia asked.

“No, sweetie.” Dad was sad, too.

“Why are we moving to a farm town, then?”

“Well, a lot of the big cities are having trouble like San Diego.”

“We live in Lakeside,” Daniel corrected Dad. He seemed to think this was an important point, but that made me mad, so I smacked his shoulder.”

Dad said my name sharply, then continued, “Yes, a lot of the big cities like San Diego and the littler cities around them like Lakeside are in trouble.”

I just imagined that the twins were thinking “in trouble” like somebody got mad at the cities for misbehaving.

“Remember your uncle Jake in San Francisco?” Alexia and Daniel nodded big, like they were proud to remember the man they’d met twice.

“He said he had to leave San Francisco, and he found out that Madera is a good place. So, we’re gonna go live with Uncle Jake and his friends.”

“Is it by the ocean?”, I asked. But I instantly regretted it. I sounded like the twins with their kid questions.

Everything Mom and Dad said about Madera made it sound terrible, but it had two things going for it: it wasn’t on fire, and they still had water. Actually, uncle Jake said there was a big river there that sounded pretty cool and like it wasn’t gonna dry up like the San Diego River or the Colorado.

We talked through dinner. I couldn’t believe we were leaving that night, immediately after dinner. Mom and Dad revealed that they had already started packing the car. We weren’t allowed to take much stuff.

I asked why they hadn’t told us before. I asked if Gramma even knew. I asked how we were all gonna fit in the car. I asked how far it was to Madera and if there was even gonna be a place to get gas along the way if everything was falling apart, but when Gramma had her third brutal coughing attack in an hour and a half, I couldn’t ask any more questions. I was just defeated. And the twins were starting to get whiny, probably from listening to my protests. So I just shut up and kept eating until all that was left on my plate was black beans. I looked at them silently for a couple minutes, listening to my parents try to explain themselves, trying to convince us this was going to be great, and then convince us it was the only choice.

Gramma came back to the table when we were all almost already done eating.

“I’ve lived in San Diego all my life,” she said, looking down at her food.

I shot Daniel a look to make sure he wasn’t gonna point out that she lived in Lakeside.

“When I was little, this place was so much different. It was beautiful. It was cool most of the year, and it rained in the winter. This place is not…” She paused. “This is no place to live anymore. I don’t think anyone is gonna be here a year from now. I’ve been thinking that for a while now.”

She looked at me. “It was my idea to leave. I said, ‘we have to leave for those kids,’ ‘cause even if we make it through this year, there’s nothing left. You understand, Santi?”

“Yes.” I was so small right then. What could I say? She singled me out.

Gramma had barely touched her dinner with all the coughing and then her speech, but mom got up and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with something I couldn’t believe: a plate of doughnuts. I asked my mom years later how she made them, and she said it was just wheat berries she and Dad pounded into flour, some agave syrup and cinnamon they’d been saving for years, fried in coconut oil using the electric skillet connected directly to the positive and negative of a PV solar panel since the microgrid was nearly dead that day. That’s no recipe for doughnuts, but they were delicious. There was one for each of us, and Gramma split hers three ways for us kids to share.

The twins had never eaten anything like that, and they were ecstatic.

I’d seen my father cry a few times by then in my life, but I was surprised to look at him as I was finishing off my last piece of doughnut and see him wipe a tear from his cheek with his sleeve, then another one. We all had watery eyes from the smoke all the time, but he was crying for sure. I knew it. Then he and Mom leaned into each other and sobbed right onto each others’ shoulders. But the incredible thing was, at that moment, that’s when I didn’t feel sad or scared anymore.

***

Ubaldo and I have bored our kids to death with all the stories about the world as it was when we were kids and our adventures moving from failing community to failing community. But I never thought to tell them the story of my family’s last dinner before we left San Diego until it was our last night in Portland.

We talked about the plans we’d been working on together for weeks. This was much different than my parents springing Madera on us. Our kids were involved in the decision from the beginning. But I told them about my Gramma and my family as I brought out a plate of doughnuts, even worse than the ones my mom had made. And they watched me cry like my father.