Free Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson

in my dreams, when I was chased and running, I saw yellow lights in a kitchen, the blue back of my grandmother’s dress as she bent over to reach a low cupboard. My grandmother was almost always home.
    My mother slowed the car when we turned onto the old road. The sky was darker, the road was uneven, there were no streetlights, only stars. We heard wind in the tall trees. When we walked inside, my grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, her silver glasses low on her nose, picking the meat out of hickory nuts, collecting the soft parts inside a glass jar.
    The plates she used for every day were white with a faded gold line around their rims. The china was scratched from knives and some of the plates were chipped, but I’d known them all my life. She brought out a blueberry pie from the cupboard, still in thesquare pan, covered with tinfoil, the blueberries black and glistening, caught in a net of glaze like a dark and liquid lace.
    My mother sighed, exhausted, holding her coffee cup and looking around the room. It was a place where she recognized everything, the position of the house on the land, the stars out the kitchen windows and the clean, ironed hairpin lace doilies. She did not like the house, she would never have chosen it, but it was the only place I saw her thin shoulders fall, where she hooked her jacket on a peg instead of buttoning it up around a hanger. Her legs swung under the table and her smile came easily to me, no matter what I’d done, no matter how bad I’d been. She was tired and home.
    We heard the distant running noise of the highway and the nearer etching of the crickets by the side of the house, and in the kitchen, the refrigerator and fluorescent lights hummed.
    “I was watching Welk,” my grandmother said.
    “Oh, should we go in there, Mom?”
    “Ugh, no, it’s all reruns. I’ve seen it before.”
    My mother stood up when she thought she should go, slowly, as if she didn’t want to. The beds here were made with tight sheets dried on a line outside and then ironed. You could hear the wind through the walls. But she had to go. She was grown up and married. We waited for a moment by the screen door, looking at the car. My mother had to go out and get in it. She turned on all her lights. The car glowed like a lit cage. We watched until we couldn’t see her anymore.
    In the downstairs bedroom, there were hundreds of pajamas and nightgowns in the dresser drawers, most of which had never been worn. People gave them to my grandmother for Christmas and her birthday and Mother’s Day. When her husband was alive, she’d received them on anniversaries, too.
    “I don’t know what it is about me that makes them think of pajamas.” She lifted up a pink gown from a box. “Look at this. I don’t wear such fancy stuff. I wish she’d come and take it back.”
    My mother had tried to outdo the others, with silks and quilted satin, crocheted inserts, ostrich plumes and matching robes.
    “It must be something about me,” she frowned.
    I picked cotton men’s pajamas, my grandfather’s, like the ones my grandmother wore. The huge legs dragged on the floor and the elastic hung loose around my waist.
    We had cornflakes before bed. We didn’t talk. The train whistled, gone as soon as it was there, shaking the ground, moving north. The upstairs smelled of fresh-cut pine. It had been like that for years. I looked out the window on the landing. The oak leaves were close and big like hands; between them you could see stars.
    I heard the toilet flush, then footsteps to the back door, where my grandmother called in her dog, shutting the screen again, when he was shaking against her ankle. She snapped the porch light off. The dog’s tail beat against the wall as she talked him into settling down. She bent down in the corner, patting him. He always had huge particles of brown lint in the corners of his eyes. I suspected she let him sleep upstairs with her when she was alone.
    “Yas, yas, you, sure,