All the people driving nice new cars pass by. I'm in the tree in Joyce’s front yard, looking over all the things we splayed out on blankets for people to take. The people driving beaters slow down to eye, some park, pick up, and together we cackle. Alicia, tanned, wrinkled, blonde, found leather chaps in my grandma’s closet and wore them over her daisy dukes. She flirted with the movers: Oh, you’re so gentle, so good with sharp corners. Is that a hickey on your neck? The mover, who obviously dawned a hickey, said no, that it was a tattoo. Oh the hickey’s a tattoo? She asked my aunt to write their names on each side of her neck with the sharpie in her hand: Zane and Jon, short for Jonathan. They had to come back for a pair of snowshoes that are allegedly Alaskan. And Alicia’s number. Their names are now smeared all over her face because she’s been sweating. My dad and I threw a grapefruit back and forth until it fell apart. Then we picked another from the tree. It, too, splintered and sprinkled drops of juice on our t-shirts and made our hands stick together. After sucking from it, avoiding bits of gravel, I threw each carcass in the dump truck, in with the birthday cards and envelopes and receipts my grandmother saved in her Ethan Allen dresser.
People thanked us for Free Stuff and came back the next day with wheelbarrows. They carted away glasses, pitchers, picture frames, cabinets, jewelry, candle holders, clowns, dolls, Santas, roosters, needlework, vases, jewelry boxes, bibles, plates with weird portraits of John F Kennedy, Elvis, and Abraham Lincoln on them, baskets, crosses, coasters, pots, pans, shopping bags, lamps, tables, strainers, plastic and glass dachshunds, plastic and glass swans, plastic and glass fruit, plastic and glass. We drank Red Bull, Fireball, vodka, Coors Light, and Polar seltzer.
Sometimes my dad howls with laughter and other times he cries. Alicia does her best to keep him laughing and I do mine to keep the tears at bay. We watched Jumanji and Fried Green Tomatoes and clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos. In Sacramento the breeze can keep you cool, at least in April. My aunt found my vape on the couch and half-heartedly lectured me. It was something she felt like she had to do, since she was here when her mom died and she watched her lungs fill with water after contracting COPD. I was not, nor was my dad. She calls it a horrible death. I shrugged and told her that I’m only 21 and she was 84 and anyway vaping isn’t what did her in. And everyone was begging Joyce to go, to please stop stringing us along. Alicia doesn’t know where she’s going to go next. Neither does Sabrina. Neither do I but I do have a place to live. No one likes Sabrina, anyway, because she thinks it’s funny that rats ate the chicken off the stove last night. And they blame the infestation on her because she lived here with Joyce when she was dying. I also found it funny but I didn’t tell anyone that. I laughed when I heard them scurrying on the ground at night and squeaking to each other because I imagined them doing the dishes, cleaning the house, even sorting some of my grandmother’s things so I didn’t have to. Though I did squirm because I was on an air mattress, on the floor right next to the kitchen, so I put on my headphones and played Ryuichi Sakamoto.
It’s quiet now in a way certain to a Sacramento suburb during midday, and we're all sitting down, smoking, sipping, fiddling, scrolling, each with our own experience of grief that we're trying to distract from. I haven’t cried and probably won’t. I didn’t have much of a relationship with the deceased, and didn’t really care to. But I am mourning this tree and lawn and all the grapefruits, and hoping that I find them somehow in my life somewhere down the line. I only really just felt her absence yesterday morning, while on the porch eating a grapefruit off a tree in her backyard she supposedly hated and I never knew existed. The piece of fruit was sweet and squishy and pale, like her I suppose. It’s an odd thing, feeling both a new absence and a new sense of the absence of a lifetime, knowing that I will never recover any kind of time or share any kind of space with her. But I’m okay with that. I am able to sit with melancholy, though it makes life dreary and wilted and me sleepy and slothish. My dad, though, is packing up her entire house and transplanting it to his, hoping, too, to transplant a lifetime he spent mostly without her. Of course, of course, his grief is more acute. Of course, of course, his grief is more acute. And perhaps I will eat only grapefruits for the rest of my life in an effort akin to his.
