The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

We stood outside the car as if we needed to reassure ourselves that we were really here. Like that maple tree next to the driveway, whose scarlet-leafed shade we parked in, like our grandfather always had — it had to have grown, but then so had I, so it no longer seemed like the beanstalk into the clouds it once was. Yet it had to be the same tree, because hanging from the lowest limbs were a couple of old dried gourds, each hollowed out, with a hole the size of a silver dollar bored into the side. There would be a bunch more hanging around behind the house. Although they couldn’t have been the same gourds. It pleased me to think of Grandma Evvie doing this right up until the end. Her life measured by the generations of gourds she’d turned into birdhouses, one of many scales of time.

How long since we’ve been here, Gina?

Ohhh… gotta be… four or five gourds ago, at least.

Really. That long.

Yeah. Shame on us.

It was the same old clapboard farmhouse, white, always white, always peeling. I’d never seen it freshly painted, but never peeled all the way down to naked weathered wood, either, and you had to wonder if the paint didn’t somehow peel straight from the can.

We let ourselves in through the side door off the kitchen — I could hardly remember ever using the front door — and it was like stepping into a time capsule, everything preserved, even the smell, a complex blend of morning coffee and delicately fried foods.

We stopped in the living room by her chair, the last place she’d ever sat. The chair was so thoroughly our grandmother’s that, even as kids, we’d felt wrong sitting in it, although she’d never chased us out. It was old beyond reckoning, as upholstered chairs went, the cushions flattened by decades of gentle pressure, with armrests as wide as cutting boards. She’d done her sewing there, threaded needles always stuck along the edge.

“If you have to die, and don’t we all,” Gina said, “that’s the way to do it.”

Her chair was by the window, with a view of her nearest neighbor, who’d been the one to find her. She’d been reading, apparently. Her book lay closed on one armrest, her glasses folded and resting atop it, and she was just sitting there, her head drooping but otherwise still upright. The neighbor, Mrs. Tepovich, had thought she was asleep.

“It’s like she decided it was time,” I said. “You know? She waited until she’d finished her book, then decided it was time.”

“It must’ve been a damn good book. I mean… if she decided nothing else was ever going to top it.” Totally deadpan. That was Gina.

I spewed a time-delayed laugh. “You’re going to Hell.”

Then she got serious and knelt by the chair, running her hand along the knobbly old fabric. “What’s going to happen to this? Nobody’d want it. There’s nobody else in the world it even fits with. It was hers. But to just throw it out…?”

She was right. I couldn’t stand the thought of it joining a landfill.

“Maybe Mrs. Tepovich could use it.” I peered through the window, toward her house. “We should go over and say hi. See if there’s anything here she’d like.”

This neighborly feeling seemed as natural here as it would’ve been foreign back home. The old woman in that distant house… I’d not seen her in more than a decade, but it still felt like I knew her better than any of the twenty or more people within a five-minute walk of my own door.

It was easy to forget: Really, Gina and I were just one generation out of this place, and whether directly or indirectly, it had to have left things buried in us that we didn’t even suspect.

If the road were a city block, we would’ve started at one end, and Mrs. Tepovich would’ve been nearly at the other. We tramped along wherever walking was easiest, a good part of it over ground that gave no hint of having been a strawberry field once, where people came from miles around to pick by the quart.

But Mrs. Tepovich, at least, hadn’t changed, or not noticeably so. She’d seemed old before and was merely older now, less a shock to our systems than we were to hers. Even though she’d seen us as teenagers she still couldn’t believe how we’d grown, and maybe it was just that Gina and I looked like it had been a long time since we’d had sunburns and scabs.

“Was it a good funeral?” she wanted to know.

“Nobody complained,” Gina said.

“I stopped going to funerals after Dean’s.”

Her husband. My best memory of him was from when the strawberries came in red and ripe, and his inhuman patience as he smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and hand-cranked a shiny cylinder of homemade ice cream in a bath of rock salt and ice. The more we pleaded, the slyer he grinned and the slower he cranked.

“I’ve got one more funeral left in me,” Mrs. Tepovich said, “and that’s the one they’ll have to drag me to.”