“Ginny,” Grandma Dalia said coolly, like she didn’t believe me, and I deflated. “Kai has to practice his violin now, and you have to go home. Besides,” she said, “he doesn’t play with girls.”
“I did today, Grandma!” Kai said, proud. “We played all afternoon, and it was great.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Grandma Dalia said, looking down at him. She wrapped a clawlike hand around his shoulder protectively. “But little boys and little girls don’t play together.”
“Why not?” Kai asked, disappointed.
She looked back up at me and narrowed her eyes. “Because, sweetheart. It isn’t safe.”
After a morning of debate, we decide that Grandma Dalia will be buried in a fuchsia suit, one that has a matching hat and looks like something I’d expect to see on the queen of England. Kai and I sit on the couch, ignoring the television in front of us, the suit laid across the dining room table. The TV is the one modern thing in the room—when Grandma Dalia realized she could watch soap operas and the Home Shopping Network in HD, she bought it and had it same-day delivered. The rest of the place is a strange combination of old lady and… something else.
There are knitted holders on the tissue boxes and bits of John the Conqueror root on the bookshelves. Statues of kittens sit beside house-blessing incense, black hen feathers hang by the windows—thousands of little things that would supposedly keep her, Kai, and the apartment safe. There’s an ashtray of dimes at the door; she insisted Kai tuck one into his sock each time he left, so he’d be protected even away from her fortress of charms. More than once, Kai removed it at school to contribute to the cost of a candy bar at the vending machine.
On the couch, Kai frowns—we’re trying to work out how to personalize the funeral service. “We could sing that song.” He coils his fingers around my hair, which is spread out across the pillow in his lap. I look up at him and raise an eyebrow. “You know,” he says. “That old one she sang all the time, the Kelly one—‘Has anybody here seen Kelly? K-E-double-L-Y, has—’ ”
“Oh god, now it’s stuck in my head,” I groan, curling in and covering my face with my hands.
“What? She loved it. We could sing it in rounds at the funeral,” he says, laughing a little. The sound seems to throw him; he swallows the happiness down, then speaks. “Maybe I should just play the violin.”
I pause. “I think she’d really like that.”
Kai looks at me—there are still red spots under his eyes from crying earlier. “Thank you, Ginny,” he says quietly. “I know she wasn’t your favorite person.”
“I wasn’t her favorite either,” I remind him.
“No one was her favorite,” Kai adds. “Let’s be honest. She was mean. And I think a little racist.”
“She is going to haunt the hell out of you if you keep talking like this,” I say.
“Yeah, well… she was. Is it wrong I loved her anyway?”
“No,” I say firmly. “Not at all. You’re family.” I say that like I understand the misery on Kai’s face, but to be honest, I think only losing him could make me look that way.
We’re silent for a long time.
“When is your aunt getting here?” I ask. Kai’s aunt is related by marriage and met Grandma Dalia only a handful of times. Still, she was supposed to show up and help Kai with the mountain of paperwork piling up—life insurance forms, credit card debts, estate taxes.
“I’m not sure,” Kai answers. “She said today, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.” He glances at the window—it’s still snowing heavily, the cold seeping in through the pane that cracked while the paramedics were here. We repaired it as best we could with duct tape, but it felt a little like taping up a leak on a submarine.
Kai shivers and looks back to me. “You don’t think my aunt will miss the funeral, do you? I’m worried.” Kai was the center of Grandma Dalia’s universe; this is his first time being alone among stars. I imagine it’s jarring, having your world change so fast, and I’m oddly grateful that my parents distanced themselves from me a little at a time, farther and farther away from the center, until I was barely in their orbit.
“Let’s just figure out the music,” I suggest, avoiding his question. “Work that out, and then we’ll start worrying about your aunt after dinner.”
“Right. Dinner. I’m not hungry,” Kai says, seeming confused that meals are still a thing.
“Get hungry,” I say firmly. “Because every old lady in the building has brought over a casserole. Anyway. Music—we’re figuring out music.”
“Okay—what if I can’t play tomorrow?” Kai says. He swallows. “What if I’m not able? If I’m too…”
Sad.
I nod and think for a moment. “Then we should have a backup plan,” I say. “And I think I know where to look.” I hurry to the kitchen, nearly sliding on the beat-up rug on the linoleum, There it is, on the shelf above the oven, wedged between a statue of a chicken and a dozen editions of the annual Southern Living cookbook.
I pause. I shouldn’t touch it. It’s not mine. It’s not Kai’s, even. It’s Grandma Dalia’s, even in death, and she was never crazy about Kai and I looking at it. I inhale, raise a hand, and slowly, gently tug it down. It’s a book—her cookbook, she called it, spattered with age. The cloth binding is so worn that it’s missing entirely around the top of the spine and the corners, and it’s misshapen due to all the clippings, photos, and dried four-leaf clovers I know are inside.
“Good idea,” Kai says behind me. We sit on opposite sides of the tiny kitchen table, and it feels every bit as weird as holding the book—there are only two chairs, which was Grandma Dalia’s excuse as to why I could never eat dinner with them. Kai offered to give up his seat each time he asked me to stay; she wouldn’t allow that. I slide the book across the table into Kai’s waiting palms as I remember her words. “You’re not giving your seat to that neighbor child.” It feels strange now, to just take a seat at the table when for so long one wasn’t offered.
The cookbook flops open easily to a page in the middle, one that’s marked by a thick collection of magazine clippings, stuck together with a paperclip. This page is still mostly blank, though I suspect it’s the only one of its kind. Most of the book is packed with recipes, quotes, and inspirational sayings. But there are pages, several dozen or so, that are very different. Pages of charms. Of warnings. Descriptions of beasts, of their teeth and claws. Grandma Dalia gathered information on them from all sorts of people—psychics, scholars, hoboes—and wrote it all down, as if she planned on writing a book on her paranoia.