Page 7

“He loved you, Scotty,” she says as she peers through the glass and “Sweet Home Alabama”plays softly through the speakers. “Loved the life you brought to death. He always said that when he spoke of you. We both—” She looks at me, her mouth open in her extended pause. “Thought he loved you.”

I swallow several times uncomfortable with both her compliment and the delivery. She’s probably in her seventies and beautiful in that way older women are. Her silver hair is cropped but curly, and she’s wearing a simple white button-down shirt with almost trendy blue jeans. There are gold studs in her ears and a goldnecklace around her neck with a small clock hanging from it that she’s sliding along the chain. When she catches me watching the movement, she stops. I wonder if it belonged to Archie.

“I had him fooled, Mrs. Watkins,” I say with a slight smile.

“Please,” she says, batting a hand through the air as she sniffs. “Call me”—she pauses, looking at me with an unexpected intensity—“Lydia.”

I’ve never met Archie’s wife, but she’s odd. Despite how put together she looks, she’s awkward compared to Archie. Maybe it’s the grief. It’s rare to see anyone smooth when a piece of their heart is being cooked in front of them at sixteen hundred degrees.

I force a smile. “Lydia.”

She clears her throat several times before finally asking: “Did you know your grandparents?”

My head whips toward her at the unexpected personal nature of the question.

She blinks, with a curious tilt of her chin and shape of her eyes. I roll my lips between my teeth, considering how to answer.

“My dad’s parents, a little,” I finally tell her, skirting around the details. The truth: a little was far too much. My own dad, a wreck of a man, was raised by people who fell to the same blight of bad decisions as the rest of the bloodline. Apples don’t fall far from the family tree because he got both his love of liquor and short temper from my grandfather. On nights my brother and I had the unfortunate privilege of being dumped on them, our only goal was to stay out of the way and not get screamed at or spanked.

“And your mom’s parents?” Her warm eyes stay steady on mine.

I shake my head, looking away from her to the cremation room, clearing my throat to mask my surprise at her inquisition. And still, because it’s Archie’s wife: “No. My mom moved out and married young . . . I never asked questions. She told me they were no good.” At sixteen, my mom had my brother, married my dad, Lyle Armstrong, and dropped her Joplin name. The rare times someone brought them up, she said she left that name and the people tied to it where they belonged. “I had enough no good, you know?”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Lydia says, twisting a tissue in her hands. “That’s nonsense.”

At this, I laugh.

“Mrs. Watkins—” She frowns. “Sorry, Lydia.” I clear my throat once again. “I appreciate that. But . . . I know you and Archie had kids—they got lucky. I got . . .”Fucked.Her crisp white shirt makes me think this word would not land well. “Unlucky.”

She stares; it’s analytical. Same as every time my history comes up to anyone who hasn’t been through it. My mother’s parents were nameless, faceless villains in a long line of them. She never talked about them; I never asked. I had enough repossessed vehicles, threats of eviction, and someone slamming a door before leaving for days without bringing more shitty people into the disastrous mix.

Abruptly, Lydia crosses the room to the coffee table where she fishes a small album out of her purse and hands it to me. “We have a lake house—did you know?” I shake my head as she nods for meto open it. “I say we, it was really just Archie’s.” She chuckles. “We bought it almost fifty years ago. Spent most summers there.”

At the first image, I snort a laugh. “An A-frame? Never would expect ol’ Archie to fit in a triangle.” Yet there he is, black button-down shirt and blue jeans, sitting on a large porch in front of a triangle-shaped wall covered in windows.

“It was new back then, but he didn’t care what it looked like.” Her lips lift in amusement. “It could have been a dirt-floored shack, and he would have wanted it. Told me it was his place to escape even though it was less than thirty minutes from where we lived.”

I flip the pages. Random snapshots fill the sleeves of the extremely dated and mostly hideous A-frame. Lydia cooking in a kitchen, wearing denim overalls and surrounded by mustard-yellow appliances. A strange looking black-and-white dog lying on burnt-orange shag carpet by a woodstove and tube television. Archie reading the newspaper on a floral couch. When I get to a picture of a little kid taking a bath overflowing with bubbles in a puke-green tiled bathroom, she chuckles and says, “Our grandson.”

I smile and flip to a photo that was taken outside: people sitting on the large porch, kids floating on tubes around the small beach. Tall pine trees. Archie fishing out of a canoe in the distance. A brief punch of sadness hits and I think of my dad. Despite his flaws, he loved fishing. We never had a boat, but he’d sit on a riverbank with a cooler of beer all day long, even if he didn’t catch a thing.

The last page is more faded than the rest. Archie and Lydia are young—much younger than they were in the rest of the photos—holding a baby they’re looking down at with proud smiles. Their love is evident. The face of the baby isn’t visible, but it’s easy to imagine the gummy smile curving its mouth and drool coating its chin.

“Our oldest grandchild,” she says.

I close the album and hand it back to her with a smile. “It looks like you had a lot of great memories there.”

The lines on her face deepen as she seems to be considering what to say next. She rubs one palm over the brown leather cover of the album—slowly—like it’s something sacred.

“I’m sorry you had such a rough go at childhood,” she says. “It should have been different. I wish”—I raise my eyebrows.Where the hell is this going?—“life wasn’t so complicated.”

Okay.

I press my lips together and say nothing.

“We all make choices in life we have to live with,” she continues, face filled with distant resignation. “Fight battles we shouldn’t have fought. Skipped battles we shouldn’t have skipped.” She laughs softly; it’s empty. “Regrets are the hardest thing in the world to reconcile when you get to be my age.” Her voice is sad; her hand is back on the clock around her neck, zipping it along its chain. Her gaze remains steady on the working retort. “I guess that’s being human, hard as it is to manage sometimes.”

Though I don’t disagree with the sentiment, my smile is half forced and fully confused.