Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

How long since we’ve been here, Gina?

Ohhh… gotta be… four or five gourds ago, at least.

Really. That long.

Yeah. Shame on us.

It was the same old clapboard farmhouse, white, always white, always peeling. I’d never seen it freshly painted, but never peeled all the way down to naked weathered wood, either, and you had to wonder if the paint didn’t somehow peel straight from the can.

We let ourselves in through the side door off the kitchen — I could hardly remember ever using the front door — and it was like stepping into a time capsule, everything preserved, even the smell, a complex blend of morning coffee and delicately fried foods.

We stopped in the living room by her chair, the last place she’d ever sat. The chair was so thoroughly our grandmother’s that, even as kids, we’d felt wrong sitting in it, although she’d never chased us out. It was old beyond reckoning, as upholstered chairs went, the cushions flattened by decades of gentle pressure, with armrests as wide as cutting boards. She’d done her sewing there, threaded needles always stuck along the edge.

“If you have to die, and don’t we all,” Gina said, “that’s the way to do it.”

Her chair was by the window, with a view of her nearest neighbor, who’d been the one to find her. She’d been reading, apparently. Her book lay closed on one armrest, her glasses folded and resting atop it, and she was just sitting there, her head drooping but otherwise still upright. The neighbor, Mrs. Tepovich, had thought she was asleep.

“It’s like she decided it was time,” I said. “You know? She waited until she’d finished her book, then decided it was time.”

“It must’ve been a damn good book. I mean… if she decided nothing else was ever going to top it.” Totally deadpan. That was Gina.

I spewed a time-delayed laugh. “You’re going to Hell.”

Then she got serious and knelt by the chair, running her hand along the knobbly old fabric. “What’s going to happen to this? Nobody’d want it. There’s nobody else in the world it even fits with. It was hers . But to just throw it out…?”

She was right. I couldn’t stand the thought of it joining a landfill.

“Maybe Mrs. Tepovich could use it.” I peered through the window, toward her house. “We should go over and say hi. See if there’s anything here she’d like.”

This neighborly feeling seemed as natural here as it would’ve been foreign back home. The old woman in that distant house… I’d not seen her in more than a decade, but it still felt like I knew her better than any of the twenty or more people within a five-minute walk of my own door.

It was easy to forget: Really, Gina and I were just one generation out of this place, and whether directly or indirectly, it had to have left things buried in us that we didn’t even suspect.

If the road were a city block, we would’ve started at one end, and Mrs. Tepovich would’ve been nearly at the other. We tramped along wherever walking was easiest, a good part of it over ground that gave no hint of having been a strawberry field once, where people came from miles around to pick by the quart.

But Mrs. Tepovich, at least, hadn’t changed, or not noticeably so. She’d seemed old before and was merely older now, less a shock to our systems than we were to hers. Even though she’d seen us as teenagers she still couldn’t believe how we’d grown, and maybe it was just that Gina and I looked like it had been a long time since we’d had sunburns and scabs.

“Was it a good funeral?” she wanted to know.

“Nobody complained,” Gina said.

“I stopped going to funerals after Dean’s.”

Her husband. My best memory of him was from when the strawberries came in red and ripe, and his inhuman patience as he smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and hand-cranked a shiny cylinder of homemade ice cream in a bath of rock salt and ice. The more we pleaded, the slyer he grinned and the slower he cranked.

“I’ve got one more funeral left in me,” Mrs. Tepovich said, “and that’s the one they’ll have to drag me to.”

It should’ve been sad, this little sun-cured widow with hair like white wool rambling around her house and tending her gardens alone, having just lost her neighbor and friend — a fixture in her life that had been there half a century, one of the last remaining pillars of her past now gone.

It should’ve been sad, but wasn’t. Her eyes were too bright, too expectant, and it made me feel better than I had since I’d gotten the news days ago. This was what Grandma Evvie was like, right up to the end. How do you justify mourning a thing like that? It should’ve been celebrated.

But no, she’d gotten the usual dirge-like send-off, and I was tempted to think she would’ve hated it.

“So you’ve come to sort out the house?” Mrs. Tepovich said.

“Only before our parents do the real job,” Gina told her. “They said if there was anything of Grandma’s that we wanted, now would be the time to pick it out.”

“So we’re here for a long weekend,” I said.

“Just you two? None of the others?”

More cousins, she meant. All together, we numbered nine. Ten once, but now nine, and no, none of the others would be coming, although my cousin Lindsay hadn’t been shy about asking me to send her a cell phone video of a walkthrough, so she could see if there was anything she wanted. I was already planning on telling her sorry, I couldn’t get a signal up here.

“Well, you were her favorites, you know.” Mrs. Tepovich got still, her eyes, mired in a mass of crinkles, going far away. “And Shae,” she added softly. “Shae should’ve been here. She wouldn’t have missed it.”

Gina and I nodded. She was right on both counts. There were a lot of places my sister should’ve been over the past eight years, instead of… wherever. Shae should’ve been a lot of places, been a lot of things, instead of a riddle and a wound that had never quite healed.

“We were wondering,” Gina went on, “if there was anything from over there that you would like.”

“Some of that winter squash from her garden would be nice, if it’s ready to pick. She always did grow the best Delicata. And you’ve got to eat that up quick, because it doesn’t keep as long as the other kinds.”

We were looking at each other on two different wavelengths.

“Well, it doesn’t,” she said. “The skin’s too thin.”

“Of course you’re welcome to anything from the garden that you want,” Gina said. “But that’s not exactly what we meant. We thought you might like to have something from inside the house.”

“Like her chair,” I said, pretending to be helpful. “Would you want her chair?”

Had Mrs. Tepovich bitten into the tartest lemon ever grown, she still wouldn’t have made a more sour face. “That old eyesore? What would I need with that?” She gave her head a stern shake. “No. Take that thing out back and burn it, is what you should do. I’ve got eyesores of my own, I don’t need to take on anyone else’s.”

We stayed awhile longer, and it was hard to leave. Harder for us than for her. She was fine with our going, unlike so many people her age I’d been around, who did everything but grab your ankle to keep you a few more minutes. I guessed that’s the way it was in a place where there was always something more that needed to be done.

Just this, on our way out the door:

“I don’t know if you’ve got anything else planned for while you’re here,” she said, and seemed to be directing this at me, “but don’t you go poking your noses anywhere much off the roads. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around.”