Carla did not come home to take care of her grandmother out of kindness. She didn’t sublet her Chicago apartment for six months and come lumbering back to the scorching Alabama suburbs out of any sense of family loyalty. She wasn’t sleeping in her childhood bedroom, the twin bed still sporting the pink and turquoise paisley sheets she’d bought in high school, because she wanted to. It was just what was done.
Carla placed the pitcher of peach tea in the center of the tray, flanked by two glasses and a small dish of lemon wedges. She rolled her eyes. I’m just missing the full swing skirt. She exaggerated the swing in her hips and glided down the hallway trying to make herself laugh.
She kicked open the old screen door and was greeted with a comfortable warmth—unfathomable for the Deep South in the middle of June. She put the tray down on the end table and gazed down the street. It wasn’t as humid as it’d been the past couple of days, and the street was crawling with neighbors, freshly liberated from the confines of air-conditioned homes.
As she poured a glass of tea, she heard her grandmother behind her. “Ain’t nothing like cool summer days,” Gram said, talking to everybody and nobody at the same time.
Carla gave a small “Mm” in agreement as she handed a glass to Gram, perched in the back corner of the porch, her rocking chair pushed aside to accommodate the wheelchair.
When Gram had fallen just a couple of weeks past New Year’s, and the doctors had begun to lay out a schedule for surgeries and physical therapy, it seemed to the rest of the family that there was no question as to who would help take care of her. Carla’s dad had called with what she thought was just another update about Gram’s condition. “It might be best if you could come down and stay with her.”
The family had no money, so hiring in-home care was out of the question. Although his new apartment was only thirty minutes away, Carla’s dad was a long-haul trucker, on the road for weeks at a time. Her Uncle Buddy had given a half-hearted offer to take Gram in, even though his own family lived all the way over on the other side of the Mississippi, and Gram was as stubborn as they came; she wasn’t going to be dragged out of her house unless she was dead.
The grandsons seemed to be out of the question, but no one mentioned why.
So that was it, no point in fighting. Still, Carla couldn’t think of saying no. The guilt of abandoning her 80-year-old grandmother was not something she wanted on her conscience. She started packing that night.
“This my peach tea recipe?” Gram asked.
“Yeah,” Carla squeezed a lemon wedge into her glass. “I found the recipe card when I was cleaning up the kitchen.”
Carla grabbed her iced tea and sat back in the rocking chair across from Gram. As she raised the glass to her lips, she caught the faint scent of lemon juice and smiled. With the tea washing over her tongue, she felt dozens of summer memories flood her mind: bike rides, freeze pops, impromptu baseball games, running through sprinklers. She reclined in the chair and closed her eyes, running her hands along the armrests. There was that familiar feel of the old wood that had been revealed as the paint had flaked off or been peeled off over the years, mostly by her own fingers. Nostalgia was a fabulous drug.
She opened her eyes directly to the scene of her past, preserved to a T.
Carla’s attention slowly drifted beyond the lawn and down the street, where she saw a group of kids battling over a soccer ball. She watched a while, amused each time they scattered into neighboring lawns to avoid the occasional car rolling by. Another group of kids whizzed by on bikes, towels slung over their shoulders, headed for the community pool.
“Nice to see that things never change,” Gram said into her glass as she brought it to her lips.
Carla looked over at her, “What d’you mean?”
“I remember all those days you used to run around town with your friends. You’d be up and out of the house by seven in the morning and wouldn’t be back ‘til all your other friends had gone home for dinner!” She chuckled, “Oh, how your Ma used to worry! But I told her, I said, ‘Jeanette, that girl won’t be young forever. Let her have some fun!’ Besides, what was going to happen to you ‘round here?”
Carla’s heart seized a little at the mention of her mother. Before bed most nights, Carla and her mom played a game where they would think up all possible iterations of Carla’s future: as a romance writer living on the French Riviera, a big cat veterinarian at the San Diego Zoo, a business executive that split her time between her Shanghai and New York apartments. The games stopped when her mother died. Breast cancer—took less than a year. Although not as exotic as their daydreams, becoming an accountant at one of the top local firms in Chicago didn’t seem too bad.
God, if she saw me now. Like I hadn’t even left.
It became clear to Carla then that life replayed itself quite consistently on these streets. Kids played the same games, had the same fights. Adults worked the same jobs and had the same complaints:
We’re really hitting a dry spell.
Hope they fill that pothole on Duke; I heard it took out Rob’s front tire.
I remember when you could still get apples at fifty cents per pound. They keep raising prices; they won’t get much business, tell ya that much.
She had let herself be briefly seduced by memories tainted by the rose-colored glasses of childhood. Here, events were fixed, cyclical. Scenes that played out twenty years ago would go on to replay in twenty years’ time. Nothing changed, and everyone stayed comfortable.
She thought about Chicago, all the things she’d left—her friends, her job, her apartment, her life. She thought about the Friday night after her first week at the firm, when her team had taken her out to some abhorrently expensive restaurant in West Loop, the nights spent stumbling around River North with her girlfriends at ungodly hours, going to the waterfront her first night and seeing the lights reflected off Lake Michigan. What had the physical therapist said this week? That Gram was making progress. How much? How much longer? She thought about calling the subletters about extending their lease.
“Gram, can I ask you a question?” Carla was grasping at straws now, but what could it hurt?
Gram took a big gulp of iced tea. “Shoot.”
“Wasn’t there ever a time you wanted to… y’know, go somewhere else?”
“Why would I wanna leave?” Gram was appalled. “I had everything I could’ve ever needed right here in town. Hell, I had everything I needed in this house. It’s our home.”
It was a sweet sentiment, and Carla’s heart should’ve been warmed, but what did she have? She wondered if there was a curse placed on anyone born here, that they were bound to the land in some way, destined to begin and end their life on the same soil.
No, this isn’t home, she thought, just the place I grew up.
Carla glanced over at Gram, who was humming while watching the world move around her. She loved her grandmother, no question. That was what rooted her here. But she was not a nurse and didn’t have the psychology for it. If she could just… convince Gram. Plead with her to go to Uncle Buddy’s or maybe somehow scrape together the money for a cheap facility—
Christ, Carla thought, I’m a terrible person.
Who sits on the front porch with their grandmother drinking homemade peach tea while secretly planning an escape? She’d never felt smaller. As she sank into her feelings, Gram broke the silence.
“You know, I always hoped you’d be back, Carla,” she said. “City life may be glamorous, but ain’t nothing compared to days like this.”
“Yeah,” Carla muttered, “it’s nice.”
And she knew she didn’t mean it.
Avery Bauer is a freelance writer, avid reader and book collector. She holds a BA in English Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where she also had her first piece published in the university literary magazine Collision. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Featured image by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash.
