Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“Grandma.” Kenny is reaching for her hand.

The subway has stopped. She jumps to her feet. Up the stairs they go, into the sunshine.

“I should have bought a hat off that stand!” she says.

This next ceremony is in the garden of the medical center. It’s cooler here, shaded and quiet. They take their seats, and a soft feeling of peace comes over her, and a new string of images from years earlier appears in her thoughts, of Kenny and Ronnie, of Kenny and Sissy. There was a fierceness in the way Sissy took Kenny into the fold back then, a determination almost greater than her own to protect him. It’s a shame Sissy couldn’t be here today. Africa! What a place for a girl who couldn’t step into the Arizona sun without acquiring a dozen new freckles.

When she gets back to Scottsdale, she’s also going to invest in a home computer. Kenny says he and Sissy communicate through “e-mails.” She’s going to find out what those are. Why shouldn’t she and Sissy communicate through e-mails also?

On the podium, a kindly-looking man with square gold-rimmed glasses is being introduced by the dean of the medical school. She’s been so busy daydreaming she completely lost track of the proceedings.

“Who is he?” she asks Jennifer.

“Dr. Lonnie Bristow, president of the AMA. He used to be a spokesman on the AIDS crisis for them.”

She thinks for a minute. “Do you think Kenny is making the right decision, Jennifer? Going into research?”

“He’ll be great,” Jennifer answers firmly.

She folds her hands in her lap. A year after Kenny came to live with them, about when Patty Ann took up with Glenn, Kenny started wetting his bed. No matter how much she scolded or teased or pleaded, he couldn’t stop it. Look, Barbara, Ronnie finally said. I know you’re the one with the experience raising kids. But let’s have Kenny sleep in our bed. I’m willing to bet he’ll never again have an accident . For the following week, Kenny slept in the big bed with her while Ronnie slept on the sofa. Never once did she wake up to wet sheets. At the end of the week, Kenny went back to his own bed, dry as the desert around them.

She was what? A grandma? A mother? A grandma-mother? She never thought of Kenny as one of her children. He was always Patty Ann’s son. But she loved him as though he were her own child. And Ronnie loved him like a father would have.

All her life, she’s wanted to believe in the truth of order. But life is more like a crazy juggernaut of possibilities, like one of those incomprehensible charts of the nervous system Kenny brought home over the holidays to study, synapses shooting in every direction. How can there be order? Somehow she met a nice man from church who was willing to throw in his lot with hers, even though hers was weighted with five kids and a mountain of bills and his was so light. It was wrong of her to think earlier of Michael at Kenny’s graduation; it is Ronnie who should be here, with all that gentle pride he carried silently around with him, helping little Kenny earn his Boy Scout badges, learn to do the crawl down at the community pool. To combat his bed-wetting problems.

Ronnie wasn’t Michael. He was Ronnie .

“I’m sure Kenny will be, too,” she tells Jennifer.

The ceremony ends, and they find their way into the reception. Kenny guides her through the crowd, introducing her to friends and professors, always using the same words: “And here is my grandma, Barbara McCloskey. Without her, I wouldn’t be here.”

And each time she thinks: And without you, I wouldn’t be here, either .

Because every relationship, from the most intimate to the most fleeting, has the power to change the course of life until, after a while, life becomes a Tinkertoy accumulation of connections: her long-dead father-in-law back in Massachusetts — the broken World War I vet she only once met but whose nonetheless uncrushable belief in humanity and sense of duty triggered Michael’s decision to enlist during World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the day she volunteered to come through the ward where Michael was convalescing, peddling books and magazines she herself had no interest in reading; the night Patty Ann allowed a good-for-nothing greasy boy to drive her home, then sat in his car kissing him until she, with Sissy on her hip, came out and banged on its window; the ex-marine who shot Kennedy, making LBJ president, who then ended new draft exemptions for married men, which compelled Patty to marry that useless boy, and then to have a baby with him, and then to hand that baby over to her to raise…

And there he is standing in front of her, a full-fledged doctor.

She squeezes Kenny’s arm and nods toward Jennifer, chatting with two young men in robes. She can hear them teasing and coaxing her to continue, with Kenny, to a party after the reception is over. “Jennifer seems like a sweet girl. When are you going to get hitched?”

Kenny laughs. “One celebration at a time, Grandma!”

She pats his arm. “You know what? I think I’m done here now. I’m going to go back to my hotel and leave the two of you with your friends.”

“But, Grandma, our dinner reservation—”

She looks at her hand, veined now but still slim and delicate, on his arm. “You have dinner with your young woman. Really. We had lunch together. And we’ll have lunch and dinner together tomorrow. I think you should get to do both — celebrate with your family and with your friends. And frankly, I don’t want to celebrate with your friends.” She gestures at the crowd of young women and men in their cocktail dresses and sober dark suits and smiles. “They look kind of boring.”

Kenny laughs again. “Oh, Grandma. Are you sure?”

“Kenny, am I ever not sure of what I want?”

They make up a paper-bag dinner for her in a little Spanish grocery store — Jennifer’s idea, but she doesn’t protest. She doesn’t argue either when Kenny hails her a taxi. She slides into the back, placing the paper bag on her lap and her handbag neatly next to it. The taxi heads down to the highway, racing along the Hudson River, thick and gray-blue in the late afternoon sunshine. Cars bob in and out of the lanes; on the other side of the highway, heading uptown and out of the city, the traffic is almost at a standstill. The taxi exits the highway and heads back onto the streets of New York. People of all ages emerge from subways, doorways, newspaper-and-tobacco shops, on their way home from school or work. Somehow, trees with pale green leaves manage to grow through the cement of the sidewalks. Garbage piles out of trash containers that should be emptied. Squirrels hop on top of them, vying with sparrows for the spoils. The taxi pulls up across the street from the hotel, pauses, and throws itself into a U-turn.

“My,” she says, extracting her wallet to pay the driver. “Do you charge extra for the thrill element?”

The driver laughs. “For you, young lady, it’s on the house.”

Barely has her foot hit the ground when a couple comes up to claim the taxi. The streets are alive. Nannies walk with their young charges, returning from ballet class or tennis lessons. Women trip along wearing business suits with sneakers, like Molly was — probably those same kids’ mothers. There are men on the street, too, but at this moment the females seem to dominate.

Down on the corner, the woman missing a tooth is still begging. She walks over to her. “Here,” she says, holding out the paper bag with her dinner. “Have this.”

The woman opens the bag, examines the oversize club sandwich, banana, and bottle of apple juice. “I don’t drink juice with my food. I’m allergic. I drink soda.”

She shrugs. “Take it or leave it.”