Page 98 of An Introvert's Guide to Life and Love
“Please. My mom would be insulted.”
We find our way back to Daniel’s car. As he drives us back to Sandy Shores, the two of them discuss baseball, real estate, local gossip, and more baseball, and I lean my head against the back-seat window, smiling to myself. At least I know that Gramps will have a friend in Daniel after I’m gone.
It’s Friday, my last day of virtual work, and there’s no way I can focus. I’m torn between the desire to spend time with Gramps and the desire to work on Pebble Cottage. In the end, I dither around, not really doing either.
I’ve put off booking my ticket home, so now it’s painfully expensive. But I finally rip off the Band-Aid and buy a ticket to Seattle, leaving Sunday morning.
Gramps finds me in my room in the early afternoon as I’m folding my clothes and slowly stacking them into my suitcase.
“Packing already?” he asks. Then he spies my laptop, which is open on top of the dresser with a Zoom meeting on the screen, the volume so low it’s barely audible. “Oops.” He holds one finger to his lips.
“It’s okay,” I say. “We’re muted, and I’m not really listening anyway.” I fold the black dress from Bettina’s, then take it out and roll it up instead.
Gramps sits on the edge of the bed. “Lottie always rolled her clothes when she packed. Said it kept things from wrinkling.”
“She told me the same thing. She always had clever little tricks.” I sit back on my heels. “She told me about boot shapers back when I went through a riding boot phase. And she got me these tiny sachets filled with lavender to put in my dresser drawers.”
“To keep away moths,” Gramps says.
“And to keep your clothes smelling fresh.”
“Lavender still makes me think of her,” he says quietly.
“I miss her.”
Gramps just smiles, as if at a distant memory, gazing into the other room, where Wally sleeps on the couch.
“I bet she would have some sort of pep talk for me right now,” I continue. “Something to get me pumped up to return to work.”
“Oh, let’s think. What would she say about it?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t want to speculate, really. I just wish, with a bone-deep heaviness, that I could have one last conversation with my grandmother. And I’m sure Gramps does, too. I try to lighten the mood a little. “I’m sure if she could see the state I’m leaving Pebble Cottage in, she’d regret leaving it to me.”
Gramps doesn’t laugh. He gives me a shrewd look and says, “Have I ever told you the story of how she found that house?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t know Lottie was the one who found it.”
“We had moved here from Cincinnati a few years before. We’d been living in an apartment over a butcher shop—now, that wasn’t a problem, because Stan, the butcher, gave us discounted cuts on Shabbat—but the apartment had a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, which was used by two other families. We’d been savingevery penny we could—darning our socks, making one pot of soup last three or four days—to someday buy a house. When Lottie was pregnant with your mother, she took to riding her bike around different neighborhoods on her way to work—”
“I thought her boss wouldn’t let her work while she was pregnant,” I interrupt.
“That’s true. So she hid both of her pregnancies until the very end, when she looked like she was smuggling a beach ball under her dress. The doctor advised her on how not to gain more than fifteen pounds or so.”
“Yikes.”
“Your mom and Trish turned out fine. Anyway, one morning she rode past Pebble Cottage. The next-door neighbor was out watering his grass, and she stopped to talk to him. Asked if anyone on the block would be moving soon. Said he had no idea. But she liked the look of that street, so she kept coming back. Struck up a conversation with whoever she met. One day, a woman on the other side of the cul-de-sac told her that the owners of Pebble Cottage were moving to Scottsdale to be closer to their grandkids. The woman didn’t know if they’d be selling the house or keeping it, and she wouldn’t give Lottie their phone number when she asked. Lottie knocked on their door, but they weren’t home that morning, and she didn’t want to wait around. So when she got to work, she looked up the local realtors in the phone book and called every one of them. Finally, one of them admitted he was familiar with that address, that the owner was planning to list it the following week.”
Gramps shrugs and makes a littlepoofsound as if to say,That was that. But I’m on the edge of my seat—metaphorically speaking, since I’m still sitting on the floor. “So how did she get it?”
“She talked the realtor into selling it directly to us. Laid it on thick about how we were a young, hardworking couple with a babyon the way, said we had enough cash for a down payment, and that we’d take excellent care of the house. He conferred with the owners, and it turned out they were delighted to sell the place to a young family. It had been their family home, too, see. They liked the idea of the house getting another chance at life, at watching a family grow up.”
Suddenly I’m blinking back tears—I’m getting emotional for a house.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that story. I knew Lottie loved the house, but I didn’t know the lengths she went to in order to get it.”
Gramps strides across the room and picks up the oval picture frame, the one with the picture of a young Lottie and my mom on the beach.
“She never did anything by half measures,” he says. “She had conviction. It was one of the first things I loved about her. If she wanted something, she got it. And if she didn’t care for something, or someone, well, she wouldn’t waste a minute on them. Life was for living, she said, more than once—not for twiddling your thumbs.”
