Page 2 of January

“She’s still our grandmother,” Kyle said, pushing those memories out of her mind and getting back to the point.

“She never wanted me. And she never wanted either of you. Did you ever even see her here? Did she come for a visit? Write you letters? Send money when we desperately needed it? No. I took care of both of you.Idid that. Your father left, and I took care of you.”

“Mom, we see Dad all the time.” Jolie uncrossed her arms. “He helped both of us get through college.”

“And I didn’t?” she asked, louder still. “I came to your graduations.”

“Dad helped us pay for it,” Kyle added. “And I’m not mad at you because you couldn’t. It’s just that–”

“He got some high-paying job and bought a house with that younger wife of his, and I’m stuck here? Is that it? You’re too good for a trailer now?”

“Mom, she’s, like, three years younger than him. And no one said that. We just want to know about our grandma,” Jolie replied.

“Well, there’s nothing to know. She didn’t care, so that’s the story. Now, if we’re done with this little visit, I have to get ready for work.”

“I thought you were off today,” Kyle said.

“I took an extra shift for the overtime,” she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

Kyle laughed silently because she and Jolie looked so much alike when they did that.

“Fine. Whatever.” Jolie turned to grab her coat from the chair next to the ragged sofa. “I’ve got to go, anyway.”

“Since when?” Kyle asked.

“Since now. Are you ready?”

“I guess so,” Kyle said.

Having driven Jolie over to the trailer to ask their mother these questions, she was Jolie’s ride, so before her younger, fierier sibling started full-on fighting with their mother about this, Kyle wanted to get them both out of there. It just wasn’t worth it. She knew her mother was lying about something, but they weren’t about to get the truth out of her when she was like this. Perhaps they could get her drunk later and get it out of her. She was always more open when she’d had a few. It was wrong to do, and they had other options, like going to their father, but he didn’t like talking about that time in their lives, either. Kyle got the impression that he didn’t know all that much. He’d always been kind toward their mother’s family, not bad-mouthing them, but he also tried to respect their mother’s wishes to leave that life behind and not mention them.

“Sometimes, she’s infuriating,” Jolie said the momentthey were out of the trailer and their feet crunched in the gravel of the trailer park.

“Just sometimes?” Kyle teased. “Where do you need to go?”

“Oh, nowhere. I just wanted out of there,” Jolie admitted.

Kyle laughed and asked, “Do you want to see if Dad has any more info? He just told us what he heard from his cousin.”

“We missed the funeral,” Jolie replied, walking toward the car. “She was our grandmother, Kyle.”

“I know. I don’t like it much, either. Maybe she was as bad as Mom is saying she was.”

“Oh, please. That woman was lying through her teeth, and you know it.”

“There’s got to be a reason, though, right? Something had to have happened that made her hate her or for them to hate each other. And she’s right about one thing: our grandmother didn’t exactly request a meeting with us or ask us to visit her. I never got a single birthday card or Christmas gift from her. Did you?”

“No, but there’s still something we have to be missing. I get that she might have been mad at Mom because she got pregnant with you, but Dad said she was nice, from what he remembered. Would she really kick Mom out and tell her never to come back?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle said, pressing the button on her key fob to unlock the car. “Maybe. It happens.”

“I get her being shocked and maybe doing the whole ‘hundred bucks, go away’ thing initially, but making Mom stay away when she was four months along with you? Mom doesn’t exactly have any real-life skills, so I doubt she had any before this happened. Maybe if Grandma really did that to her, we shouldn’t want to learn more about her.”

“So, are you saying that you believe Mom now?” Kyle asked, opening the door.

Jolie opened the passenger door and said, “No, I stoppedbelieving her the third time she told us that she was getting married, that we were moving out of the one-bedroom trailer, and that we’d each have our own rooms.”

Kyle nodded and climbed inside the car.

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