Marian Palaia - Given World

“Wow,” Grace says. “Someone’s angry.”

“Home, sweet home.” I feel like an interloper, as if by going to California I have abdicated any claim I might ever have had to this place. Because I have.

I wish, for the first time in months, for a cigarette, despite the fact that smoking is the reason my father’s lungs are, as he puts it, closing down shop. I know the first drags would taste terrible, make me sick and dizzy, but after that, I bet I’d remember why I loved it so much. I managed to quit a while back, and somehow, with the help of nicotine patches, paced half shots of Jim Beam, and a bottle of Valium, managed also not to kill any of my customers at the bar. After a few weeks I began to notice how keen my sense of smell was becoming, and spent hours walking around the city, no particular destination in mind, sniffing the ether like a bird dog after quail. Something similar happened as so many altered states became less appealing, less necessary, or both: I’d be driving, noticing only what I needed to, to get from one block to the next, and suddenly, at a light or in a traffic jam, lean forward and look up through the windshield to see the sky, and it would be a revelation: it had been there all along .

I lie back on the picnic table, realizing I have not looked at the sky yet — that famous Montana one; the one they brag on in all the brochures. I know they’ve also taken to talking about the state as the “Last, Best Place,” whatever that means. Last place for what?

Grace lies down next to me, pastry crumbs coating her lips and drifting into her hair, tin box next to her on the table. “So that’s it, huh?”

“What?” I ask, though I pretty well know.

“The big sky.”

“Yup.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“Because it’s bigger.”

“Than what?”

“Other skies.”

Grace turns her head, eyebrows raised. “How does that work?”

“Just does,” I say. “It’s magic.”

“You,” Grace announces, “are full of shit.”

I nod. “You are not the first one to point that out, but thank you for noticing.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she says.

When the conductor hollers “All aboard!” Grace jumps up, grabs her coffee, and runs for the train. I know I have to go too, but I am busy cleaning up after our breakfast. I throw away the trash, save the leftovers, and pick Grace’s box up off the table. It is warm from the sun.

I think about the woods again, about that cabin near the border. Some horse. Some pony. Think maybe if I loiter long enough, the train will leave without me, but it seems to be taking its sweet time too. Any more messing around will make missing it a deliberate act, and I have to draw the line somewhere. Don’t I.

I hear Grace’s voice calling to me from the doorway of the train, where she and the conductor stand together. “Riley! Get my box! It’s right there. Hurry up! They’re going to leave you!” I rub one eye with the heel of my hand. Look around. Begin to lope toward the train as if it is what I have meant to be doing all along.

Grace takes the box, and when we get to our seats presses it to her forehead, panting a little, eyes closed, knees jiggling like my hands were earlier. “Thank you,” she whispers, and I almost answer, but stop before the words come out, thinking maybe she is not talking to me after all, but to the box. I sit down and throw my head back against the seat, wishing it were harder; a slab of something. I do not touch the hard bit of stolen bone in my pocket. I leave it, and ask Grace where in North Dakota she is going.

“Turtle Mountain,” she says matter-of-factly, like she is saying “Fargo.”

“Really? Where’s that?”

“The west, I think. Close to Montana.”

“Is it pretty?” I have to ask, but know I sound doubtful, having been indoctrinated early in life to believe that North Dakota was nothing but one big wasteland.

“I think so,” Grace says. “I don’t remember anything about it. I left when I was three.”

“So why now?”

She shakes the box; the ashes rustle inside.

“Grandma,” she says.

“Grandma.”

“Yeah. Some of her. Is that weird?”

“I don’t think I am qualified to say,” I say.

“Did you know?”

“Know what?”

But Grace doesn’t answer, and I don’t look to see her expression. Instead, I take a page from Mick’s book. And lie. “I thought it might be a bunch of those little airplane bottles of whiskey. I was hoping. I could use a drink.”

“There probably would have been clinking,” Grace says.

Her story comes out in chapters: a messy family one ending with Grace being raised by her grandma while her mother found sanctuary in a pipe. “And not any peace pipe, either.”

She was raised in a little logging town near the Oregon coast. “It went belly-up in the eighties,” she says. “That spotted owl thing. It hasn’t exactly found its new calling yet. Only so much chain-saw art one town can support.”

Her grandma sent her to school and fed her when she came home, taught her to play the banjo and think for herself, and is now in a cookie tin in her lap, heading for her final destination. “There’s a spot in the hills where two streams come out of the same spring. She wants me to leave her there. She drew me a map.”

Wants . I say, “Is someone meeting you?”

“My grandpa.”

“Her husband?”

“Ex. I don’t know what happened, but she still loved him.”

“They stayed in touch?”

“Some years, but he got a whole new family.”

“She ever remarry?”

“Nope, but she didn’t let any grass grow under her, neither. She was kind of a wild one.”

“Not like you, I bet.”

Grace shakes her head, cocks it at me, and raises her eyebrows. “Maybe more like you,” she says. Sweetly.

I shrug. “Maybe.” I am hardly surprised. Shit shows. In the aftermath of a shit show.

After Essex, as we cross the old trestle bridge high over the river and roll through the south edge of Glacier, Grace brings down her banjo and quietly plucks the strings, curved metal picks on the fingers of her right hand. I think I recognize a slowish version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” that somehow morphs into “Tiny Dancer,” and suddenly realize I am listening to “Up on Cripple Creek.”

When Grace stops picking for a minute, I say, “How the hell did you do that?”

“Do what?” she says, stretching out the “what” so she sounds like she’s just come down from ole Rocky Top. She’s smiling wide, though, proud. She plays some more songs, most of which I know but have never heard them played like that before, or maybe I just wasn’t really listening.

When Grace stops playing and puts the banjo away, I say, “Damn. That was amazing. I wish I’d had the patience, or any talent, to learn how to do something like that.”

“You ever try?”

“A couple of times, but I never stuck with it. I have my brother’s guitar back in San Francisco, though, so it’s not like I couldn’t have.” Except I never did. But I did keep it. That guitar is the only thing left — the only thing I didn’t lose, hock, or break — from the trunkful of Mick I’d taken with me to California.

“Your brother play?” Grace says.

“He did. He taught me some chords, but I keep forgetting them.”

“My grandma taught me every song I know.”

“You miss her?”

“Yeah, I do.” She sucks in the corners of her sweet mouth. “Not sure it’s sunk in yet. That she’s gone gone.”

I do not say, “It may never.” I say, “You thinking about staying in North Dakota?”

“I doubt it. I was thinking New York. Or New Orleans. New something.”