'Come Back!' Cried the Little Old Woman

About fifteen Novembers ago, my mom told me during the long ride to grandma's, “People grieve in different ways.” Gray haze veiled the road and icy rain, dinged on the windshield like BB pellets.

“Grieve?”

Later that afternoon, I danced a metal cookie cutter around the kitchen table while my grandma dumped a heap of brown sugar into a mixing bowl. It looked a little like a sandcastle.

“Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man!” I sang between pursed lips like a ventriloquist.

“Remember to keep a good eye on them once they come out of the oven.” My grandma winked.

“I won’t let them get away, Grandma,” I said, squeezing the cookie cutter.

My grandma’s gold earrings swung from her ears like monkeys on vines as she flitted between ingredients. She poured molasses, darker as chocolate syrup, into a measuring cup.

“Yuck, what’s that?” I cried.

“Molasses,” she laughed. “Like Melissa, but not so sweet.” She showed me the measurements printed on the side. “Is that right?”

I looked down at the recipe I’d printed at school. I’d begun learning about fractions, and my teacher had thought baking might be a good way to practice them.

“M-O-L—”

“I see it, I see it, Grandma. It says…half a cup.” I squinted at the lines on the cup. “Yes, half a cup.”

“Very good,” she said, a smile spreading on her mulberry lips.

"And then?”

I beamed while I ran a finger over the steps. “Oh, we need…half a teaspoon of ‘al-spis.’ For the other bowl.”

Her smile waned. “Why do we need allspice for cinnamon rolls?”

I scrunched up my nose. “Cinnamon rolls? We’re making gingerbread men, Grandma.” I waved the recipe in the air.

“Oh. You’re right.” Her face became pink under a film of foundation. She picked up a measuring spoon and scooped out what looked like grains of dirt from a small bottle.

“Did we get everything?” she asked as she emptied the spoon.

I checked the recipe. “Um, ginger.”

She snatched the paper from me. “Let me see that.”

Frowning, I said, “Well, for gingerbread men we need it, right?” I leaned over the table to peek at the list.

At home, when my older brother and I fought, being “right” was paramount: yeah huh, vanilla is the worst flavor in Neapolitan ice cream, and duh, pancakes are better than waffles. But that day, being right didn’t feel as good. I might as well have been the weatherman watching the storm I predicted swell on the radar.

Maybe my fear had something to do with what else my mom said to me on the way over.

“See if it’s in the cupboard,” my grandma said, pointing over her shoulder.

I jumped up and towed my chair to the cupboard. Opening the doors, I began parting the sea of half-empty spice bottles, some unlabeled, and packages of flour separating at the seams. Behind me, a Styrofoam carton squealed when my grandma took an egg out.

While I scavenged, I noticed a mound of something scattered in the back like leaves.

Reaching into the darkness, I pulled out a trading card with a picture of man in a baseball uniform kneeling on a field, a bat balanced on his thigh. It said “Dale Murphy” along the bottom and “Braves” on the top in steel blue. I didn’t know much about baseball then, so I assumed it meant he must be courageous. His hard squint into the stands seemed to cement the notion.

"Hey, these are kinda cool!” I exclaimed, shuffling a handful of cards. “Why are these up here, Grandma?”

Her reaction startled me.

“Put those back!” she screeched. One of the cards escaped and sailed to the floor. “I don’t want Jerry to find them!”

My eyebrows tented. “Uncle Jerry?”

She cracked the egg on the bowl. The yellow goop seeped out of the shell. “He’s not allowed to take those to school.”

In the car, my mom had said that if this happened to just go along with it, throw my grandma an “m-hm” if I had to. But don’t try to argue.

So, no matter how confused it made me, I bit my tongue when she asked, “Did you find the yeast?”

“Yeast?” I smirked from where I stood on the chair. I slipped a few cards in my back pocket and returned the rest of the stack to the cupboard. “I thought we…”

“The yeast is in a little packet,” she said, attaching the whisks to the mixer.

Pulling my chair back up to the table, I laid the packet beside the nutmeg. Then, I smoothed out my recipe.

For the sake of the gingerbread men, I told her, “It’s not on here, Grandma. Should I put it ba--”

She shook her head. “No, stay out of the cupboard.”

My face felt hot with frustration when I heard the ­shrrrip of the packet being torn. She shook it empty into the bowl with the spices.

After combining the wet and dry ingredients, she made circles in the cocoa-colored sludge with the mixer, whirring like a buzz saw.

I took the cards from my pocket and held them in a fan in my lap while the mixer flicked batter onto the tablecloth.

I wondered if I only reminded Grandma about Uncle Jerry, I would be allowed to keep the cards. Certainly, if my mom saw how awesome the they were, she would understand, I thought.

“Grandma, Uncle Jerry doesn’t go to school anymore,” I said over the sound of the mixer.

She flipped the switch and set it aside. “He got sent to the principal for having those cards, and he won’t be getting caught with them again.” Color bloomed in her face.

“M-hm.”

Using a rubber spatula, she scraped the gooey batter from the sides of the bowl. Her forehead wrinkled with disgust. “He tried to say they were that boy Todd’s”—she hit the spatula off the edge of the mixing bowl— "He won’t make friends that way.”

“M-hm.”

“Always so stubborn,” she mused. "Always so lonely in there."

I tucked the cards back in my pocket. “Well, I wouldn’t get caught with them,” I assured her.

She snorted and shook her head. “You know, I tried to get him to just sign up for real baseball and he said, 'the team won't like me.' 'I'm not good enough.' Laziness, he learned it from his father.”

I grew annoyed with her game. “Grandma, Uncle Jerry went to Texas.”

“Texas?” she scoffed. “He’s never been there.”

“That’s what dad always said. Uncle Jerry went to college in Texas before I was born.”

"No, he’s only fifteen,” she seemed to say more to herself than me. “He’s never even talked about college.” She sighed and gave the bowl another whack. “Now, it has to sit for a while before we can cut it. What time is it?”

I stared at the clock. “Uh, almost three.”

She whispered, “While we’re waiting, why don’t you sneak back there and see if he’s hiding any more of those? Before he gets off the bus.”

My shoulders fell. Just go along with it, don’t be worried, Mom had said.

I headed down the hall, unsure of what “back there” meant. I poked my head around every door, buzzing with a little excitement at the thought I might find more cards. I would say to her, “I’ll hide them good, Grandma, so he can’t take them to school anymore,” and have a whole collection.

I jiggled the knob of the only room I had yet to check. A rush of cool air hit me like standing at the entrance of a tomb.

Discarded clothes and torn magazine pages laid scattered on the carpet. A batting helmet, CDs, and a studded leather jacket bellied out of the open closet. Posters of more “Brave” baseball players curled as the tape came loose with time. One of them said, “RUN HOME!” An unraveled yo-yo rested on the floor by the bed.

Seeing a backpack slouching by the foot of the bed, I entered the room and unzipped it, fast in case Uncle Jerry somehow caught me in there snooping.

“Aha,” I murmured to myself when I felt something thin and flat hidden in an inside pocket. I couldn’t suppress a smile. “Who do we have here…” When I tugged the card out, I didn’t see a suntanned player posing on the field. Instead of baseball stats, I saw a column of Ds and Fs.

I wondered how Uncle Jerry could be in college for so long if he hadn’t gotten As in regular school.

Standing by the bed with the report card, I thought about what to do.

Like putting flowers on a grave, I took the baseball cards out of my back pocket and slipped them into the musty pillowcase.

When I returned, I helped my grandma dig the dough out of the bowl and plop it onto a bed of flour she’d sprinkled on the table. I used the rolling pin to flatten it out.

She didn’t ask about the baseball cards.

Grabbing my cookie cutter, I felt the confusion in my heart fade. Before I could cut the shapes, however, my grandma took a stick of melty butter from the dish and rubbed it across the slab of dough. Then, she coated the surface in cinnamon. The aroma burnt my nostrils.

At that age and even today, I didn’t know the difference between what she chose to forget and what she didn’t.

She rolled the dough into a log and held the dough knife out to me.

My mom had told me what to say, but not how to cope. Fighting the feeling of disappointment, I put the cookie cutter aside.

“Cut about a dozen. About…an inch and a half thick… Is that what it says?” she asked, pointing at the recipe.

My palms sweaty, I glanced at the paper, trying not to notice that it didn’t say to spread cinnamon on the dough or roll it up or pour yeast into the mix. “Yeah, inch and….”

“Is it a one and a two?”

I nodded.

“Oh,” she chuckled. “You know what a ‘half’ looks like, you just told me half a teaspoon only a little bit ago.”

“I know.”

“Ah.” She rubbed her temples while I made a crooked cut in the dough. “He should have just put it down.”

“M-hm.”

"Out there in the street when they told him, he should have just put it down.”

` “M-hm.”