Free My Best Man by Andy Schell Page B

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    I was eight years old when I sat with Grammie at her ranch in Colorado, and we drank lemonade while she stitched ottoman cover. I’d come down with a mild case of chicken pox week I was supposed to fly off to Italy with my family for a week holiday, and so, being quarantined, my family went on me and left me in the care of Marzetta. instructing her to send on to my grandmother’s ranch when I was well enough to Those two weeks at Grammie’s are magic in my memory. In morning we ate bacon and pancakes, and Grammie let me small cup of coffee with lots of cream and sugar in it. We horses in the grassy valley below the house. My grandmother regal, yet trustworthy and unaffected, and for a woman of breeding, she rode comfortably in the saddle, like a cowgirl fifteen. In the afternoons, we listened to records on the
     
    everything from Patsy Cline to exotic bamboo music from a phono graph she’d obtained while on an adventure tour of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. And when we’d accidentally leave a record in the sun too long and it warped, she’d take it off the turntable and walk to the edge of the porch, high above the valley below, and fling the record far into the distance like a Frisbee. “Goodbye, Benny Goodman!” she’d yell while transforming his bowed recording into a spinning flying saucer. She taught me how to throw a Frisbee that way, with old warped vinyl records.
    In the late afternoon, we’d hike down to the stream and cast our rods for rainbow trout. And in the evening we’d take our catch to Fish Fry Point, where my grandfather had built a stone fireplace with a grill for cooking our bounty. We’d eat our fish right out of the pan, then roast marshmallows over the fire for dessert. Fish and marshmallows. Ginger ale to drink. Then Grammie would read from her latest book Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, or Wallace Stegner’s A Shooting Star until the real stars would appear, and we’d hike back to the house by the light of the moon, our handheld flashlights puncturing the trail with quick stabs of light as we walked.
    Her friend Louise came to visit us during the second week of my stay. Louise was married to a man much like Grammie’s husband, my grandfather. They were stern men, not overly comfortable around their wives, and they liked to go hunting together in Wyo ming and drink rye straight from the bottle. I loved Louise nearly as much as my grandmother. She was risque, as my mother said, and wore loose fitting dresses that were always revealing a shoulder or half a bosom. Long earrings dangled from her pierced ears, and by the time she started in on her second martini, those earrings Would begin to dance and slap her in the face as she moved her head to laugh and tell stories of her hapless year at the helm of the Women’ sLeague of Denver, where she was the only president ever to be impeached for refusing to honor the mayor with a luncheon. “He was a politically racist son of a bitch who just happened to
     
    be sleeping with his adorable black maid,” she said, offering me a sip of her martini. Grammie would scold Louise for using profanity in my company, but I could tell she loved the wild delivery Louise’s stories as much as I. Together, Louise and Grammie finished stitching that cover during the second week of my visit, taking turns as one the other tired of the detail. Upon my departure, they handed it me at the airport, wrapped in paper printed with cowboys and to give to my mother. And when I cried as they put me on plane to fly home, Louise said, “Buck up, Harry. I’ll take care your grandmother,” as if I was worried to leave her alone, of the truth that I was sad to leave them both.
    Outside the sliding glass doors, I watch a fierce north wind in and push the cold rain to the freezing point. Everything to be icing over in front of my eyes. In the yard, skeletons of oaks stand shaking, their bare arms raised, as if Donald has open the door and yelled,