I KISSED MY great-grandmother on the top of her dusty black wig and asked what she would like for her birthday. I had already sewn her a jewelry roll and mixed her a new skin-softening oil — the best I could afford to do since I had lost my job — but you don’t turn a hundred and twenty-five every day.
Abuelita turned her milky eyes to me and lifted a trembling, withered hand from her rosary to beckon me closer. “Quiero morir,” she whispered in my ear. I want to die.
I shivered, not from the cold of the windowless room, but from recognition. “Yo también,” I told her in a voice just loud enough for her to hear. “Espera, por favor. Espera.”
Me, too. Please wait.
Grandpa Estéban eyed us suspiciously from his recliner. “What are you talking about, Melissa?”
I straightened up and forced a smile, raising my voice a bit more to carry over the hum of the compressors. “I promised her some birthday cake. Would you like some? It’ll be good. Sara made it.”
He grunted. Sara’s spice cake was a rare treat and he wasn’t too far gone to know it. “Just a spoonful of frosting.”
“Can do.” I stopped at the controls in the hall on my way out and added some oxygen to their sitting room. The hall door closed behind me, its rubber seals gasping as it shut.
In the kitchen, my grown daughter and my elderly uncle were finishing up their boring-but-healthy dinner of vegetables and rice. No meat, hardly any fat, no sugar. Sara said it would extend our lives; I didn’t see the point of life without flavor.
“Time for cake and presents,” I said, unzipping my coat. It was cool in here, but not outright cold, and the sight of the long prairie sunset through the window made me feel toasty. “Might as well leave the dishes. There’ll be more soon.”
“Okay,” said Sara, rising from her place to spoon leftovers into an old yogurt container. “How many plates?”
“Five plates, three forks, and two spoons.”
“They’re both eating the cake? I’m flattered.”
“Just the frosting. You might want to sprinkle a little extra cloves on it so they can smell it.”
“You bet.”
They started putting on their coats and gloves. I nabbed the jewelry bag from my room, but I left the skin oil. I would mix her a fresh batch and change up the ingredients a little.
While Sara pulled the cake out from the fridge, Tío Gaspar picked up the small pile of presents. We didn’t usually make a big deal out of birthdays, especially Abuelita’s and Grandpa Estéban’s, since they’d had so many. We certainly never invited anyone from outside the family, since we were the only ones who knew Abuelita was still alive.
If that was what she really was.
“I guess we should leave the candles off,” said Sara.
She meant because of the heat. I didn’t mind, seeing as Abuelita had already made her wish.
Grandpa Estéban and Tío Gaspar always had the Herrero name. I took it back after my ex left and changed Sara’s along with mine. She was just little, then. Everybody in North Dakota called us “the Herreros,” pronouncing the H like a harsh gust of wind.
Sometimes, they called us “the Mexican family,” although none of us has ever even been to Mexico. Abuelita was from Barcelona originally, but the rest of us were born in the U.S.
We liked North Dakota okay, though. The air was clean, the food hearty, and people kept pretty much to themselves.
I was born in Omaha, which I remember not so much as a place as the time Abuelita could still get around. I should have called her Bisabuelita — she was Grandpa Estéban’s mother — but she preferred to have everyone but her son call her Abuelita. I was seven when the white old-lady hairs on her chin fell out and never grew back.
After that, we moved to St. Paul, where Grandpa Estéban did refrigerator installation and maintenance for restaurants. It was where I met and married my ex, where Sara was born. My parents both died in a car accident there; Tío Gaspar came home and cried after identifying them. My soft Tía Rosa, who wore loose clothing and sloshed when she walked, was buried there, too. Sara remembers them all, but barely. My brother still lives there, doing radio voiceovers and murder mystery dinner theatre.
Grandpa Estéban was born in New York City, but out of respect for Abuelita, he never talked about it.
I ate Abuelita’s birthday cake for breakfast every day until it was gone. Then I stopped eating desserts after dinner, gave up snacks altogether.
“You’re eating so much better,” said Sara approvingly.
That was what I got for sending her to medical school. Even though she’s an anesthesiologist, she still knows more about nutrition than Man was meant to know.
I made Abuelita a new batch of skin oil. I mixed in the powdered remains of the green paint we’d found under the wallpaper of this farmhouse when we moved in. Abuelita liked the house; there was a chance that it was older than she was. She didn’t have that experience often in the Midwest.
Although the arsenic and the lead shouldn’t have much scent, I added a few drops of myrrh oil. It made it smell smoky and thick.
In our family, we know a lot of things that people aren’t supposed to know.
When Sara started kindergarten, I got a good job at the regional hospital. Doctors dictated; I transcribed. There wasn’t enough of anything in particular to specialize, so I heard a bit of everything. Most of it went in one ear and out the other, but sometimes, I slowed down a little so I could listen.
My turnaround on toxicology reports was never as good as on other things. Autopsies, either.
“Me siento extraña,” complained Abuelita as I rubbed the oil into her skin with my gloved hands. “Y huelo mal.”
I fished around for the words to ask, “Is the bad feeling tingly? Are you losing sensation?” But my Spanish isn’t all that good, so I just said, “Es el regalo, abuelita. Lo que pidió.” The gift you asked for.
“Ah.” Her blind eyes lit up. “Muerte.”
It was during our first winter in North Dakota that things started to go wrong for the Herreros.
Grandpa Estéban was excited about the cold. No urban heat island, no tall buildings to break the fierce prairie winds. Dirty, gray snowdrifts buried the shelter-belt trees up to their lowest branches.
He knew we’d get frostbite if we stayed out in the snow unprotected. But what if Abuelita stayed out on the back porch of this farmhouse? Someone had put up screens against mosquitos at some point. They would hold out most of the snow.
“Think of how it could slow the deterioration,” he said, eyes wide as a child’s.
“I don’t like it,” I told him. “Abuelita won’t, either.”
But Sara was too little to know what was going on and Tío Gaspar never said a word against Grandpa Estéban. Grandpa and Abuelita sat out there one night, over her bitter complaints.
When they tried to come in the next morning, Abuelita’s left leg, frozen and brittle, broke clean through. Grandpa Estéban developed a cough that didn’t go away until there was nothing left in his lungs.
The next time he shaved, his whiskers didn’t grow back.
The month before Abuelita’s birthday, one of the two HR reps caught me on the way back from lunch. The door of the office next to hers was closed, so I knew what was coming when she sat me down.
“I’m sorry to tell you that your position has been eliminated,” she said. “The doctors are going to start using dictation software, instead.” She pushed a folder across the desk to me. “You’re not being singled out.”
The folder included a list of positions and ages of the newly unemployed. There were no names on it, but a glance showed that it was the whole department. The hit list went from the recent college grad up to my manager and me, the only ones in our fifties.
“I know you’ll do well, Melissa. You have great skills. Excellent skills. And this is an excellent severance package.”
I read the whole folder’s worth right there at her desk, taking my time. Somebody told me once that I “wintered well,” and although they might have meant “plump,” I liked to think it meant I could wait anything out. The HR rep sat there with an expectant, apologetic smile.
The severance was better-than-decent. I signed the papers and walked out of her office without saying another word.
My manager, Debbie, was leaving the other HR office. “I guess they took us in order of seniority,” she said. “At least they didn’t make me lay anybody off.” She laughed mirthlessly. “I’d feel like a murderer.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, walking toward anesthesiology in no kind of hurry. “I don’t think you would.”
Sometimes, Grandpa Estéban talked about moving further west.
“It’s getting too settled here,” he said one Sunday. All of us had gathered in the so-called living room, the living standing in our coats and the dead sitting down, to listen to Mass on Internet radio. “I keep reading that the state’s population is climbing.”
“That’s out west,” Gaspar told him. “It’s the crude. There’s no fracking here and we’d have to drive through all that activity to get anywhere quieter.”
“Nobody would care about us passing through. And who says we should go somewhere quiet? We can get lost in a city.”
Sara perked up at that. She hadn’t lived in a city since she went to medical school in St. Louis. “Portland, you mean? Or Seattle?”
“Maybe. The best place would be Alaska, but that’s a hard journey.”
He looked at Abuelita, hunched in her wheelchair. She was stroking the velvet and the lace on the jewelry roll I’d made her, although she kept it empty. She held it almost as often as her rosary, these days.
With Abuelita’s broken leg that could never heal, it took two of us to even move her from bed to wheelchair and back. Alaska was out of the question.
I took turns with Tío Gaspar in the garden that summer, stinking of mosquito repellent and raising the healthy vegetables I didn’t much like. They soaked up the long summer sun and got big. Huge.