Myth

Mom said Grandpa Reese’s death was an accident. She came out to meet me on their front lawn. She had not been crying. There was a tall magnolia in the yard, and I smelled the lemon of it. Mom didn’t let me out back where it had happened. The ambulance had already come and gone, and there was a coroner on the way. We sat on a scratchy couch in the dark living room with his wife, who my parents had taught me was not to be trusted. Until now, my brain had linked this with the fact that she had opinions, a degree, and smelled like patchouli. Her hands were shaking. The gun had jammed, she said. He must have been trying to fix it.

​

I never questioned the stories behind the other deaths, either. “Your uncle was an alcoholic, and that’s what killed him,” Mom said of Dad’s brother. Uncle Keith had a red face and wore large t-shirts. He was loud, and there’s a photo of him in a lawn chair with a glass beer bottle. Huge smile and sweaty, puffed face. I’m there too, tiny shirtless kid with white-blond puff of hair and a diaper sagging off me. Looking at him the way people look at a dog before they ask is he friendly?

​

Dad, on the other hand, said nothing about Uncle Keith. Dad said nothing about anything until his own dad died (from dementia, they said). Then, sipping milk in a cold beer mug, Dad decided he, too, was getting dementia, and he could tell he had about ten years tops. I wanted to slap the glass out of his tough tan hands.

​

Now, I sit in my apartment and wait for the gardeners to finish edging the lawns below. A slice of grass, quiet lawn later for bare feet. Don’t come outside when I’m mowing, Mom used to warn me and my sisters, because if she hit a rock the mower might fling it at our heads and kill us, or worse, blind us. She’s since confessed she just wanted peace, and cutting the grass while seeing our terrified faces pressed against the window gave her a moment of it. An adult, I still stay in until the gardeners are done demolishing grass tips, until the sidewalk is strewn with clippings, and the leaves have been blown and bagged.

​

​