Jason, her oldest brother, was in graduate school and had a job teaching summer classes. Her sister, Julianna, was a college junior; she was working, too, at a vacation lodge in Alaska. Courtney was the youngest. College expenses for her brother and sister kept adding up. Plain and simple, her father needed the money; otherwise, he would’ve waited until Courtney had graduated from high school. Except that when she did, there wouldn’t be much likelihood of getting a scholarship. Unfortunately her grades weren’t the greatest and her chances of receiving an enter-college-free card were about the same as winning the lottery. In other words, her dad would be stuck paying for her, too. Spending the year in Seattle was the obvious solution.
Everything would’ve been different if her mother hadn’t died in that freak car accident. It’d happened four years ago and still felt like yesterday.
“Courtney,” her grandmother called from the foot of the stairs. “Are you awake?”
“Yes, Grandma.” There was no way she could sleep in with the television blaring at five o’clock in the morning. Her grandmother needed hearing aids but refused to believe it. Everyone mumbled, according to Vera Pulanski. Everyone in the whole world!
“I have breakfast cooking,” her grandmother shouted.
Courtney stared up at the ceiling and rolled her eyes. “I’m not hungry.”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
She’d been with her grandmother for exactly a week and this was the seventh day in a row that they’d had this same conversation.
“I’ll eat something later,” Courtney promised. The thought of dry scrambled eggs made her want to gag, but that was how her grandmother cooked them. She had all these ideas from television about what was good for a teenager and what wasn’t. Apparently, the only way to prepare anything safely was to cook the hell out of it. As a result, her grandmother’s scrambled eggs tasted like rubber. Not that she’d ever eaten rubber, but she was convinced these would qualify.
“I hate to throw food away.”
“I’m sorry, Grandma.” With all the meals she’d skipped since she arrived, Courtney figured she should’ve lost weight. She hadn’t. The scale had glared accusingly up at her that very morning. Fresh from the shower and completely naked, she’d stepped onto the bathroom scale, a relic if there ever was one. She’d closed her eyes, then peered down at the numbers and those ridiculously tiny lines between them. Her grandmother didn’t seem to know about digital. Not only hadn’t Courtney lost weight, but it looked as if she’d gone up a pound. She wanted to weep. Starting a new school would be bad enough, but facing strangers while she was fat was even worse.
“Courtney?” Again her grandmother yelled at her from the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes, Grandma.” Vera obviously wasn’t backing off this morning.
“I’m going out for a while. I need to run a few errands.”
“Okay, Grandma.”
“I want you to come with me.”
Sighing heavily, Courtney sat up, thumped her feet onto the floor and let her shoulders slump forward. “Can I stay here?” she pleaded. After her shower, she’d put her pajamas back on, since she couldn’t think of a reason to get dressed. Not a good reason, anyway.
“I’d really like it if you joined me. You spend far too much time in your room.”
“All right, Grandma.”
“What did you say?”
Rising slowly, Courtney went over to the doorway and shouted, “I’ll be right down.”
Smiling, her grandmother nodded. “Good.”
Vera Pulanski was a wonderful woman and Courtney had always enjoyed her visits to Chicago. But this was different. She’d never had to live with someone this old before. Everything in the house would sell as an antique on eBay.
With a decided lack of enthusiasm, she pulled on her jeans and an oversize black T-shirt that had her dad’s company logo on the front. When she’d walked down the stairs Vera smiled sweetly and stopped her on the last step. Raising her arms, her grandmother cupped Courtney’s face as she studied her.
“You’re a beautiful girl.”
Courtney responded with a weak smile.
“You’re the apple of my eye, my youngest grandchild.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“I’ve always regretted that Ralph didn’t live long enough to know you.”
Her grandfather had died when Courtney was a few months old. “Me, too.”
“Now, what I’m about to say is only because I love you.”
Courtney bristled, bracing herself for another lecture. “Grandma, please, I know I need to lose weight. You don’t have to say it, all right?” Courtney couldn’t keep the defensiveness out of her voice. It wasn’t as if she could avoid looking in mirrors. She was overweight and well aware of it. The weight gain had happened after her mother’s death; until then, she’d been a size ten and suddenly, poof—she’d blown up into a sixteen. The thing Courtney resented most was being reminded of it by all those well-meaning folks who assumed it was easy to drop thirty-five pounds.
“Actually, that wasn’t what I wanted to say.” Her grandmother released Courtney’s face. “I think you need friends.”
“So do I.” She missed Chicago so much, she could cry just remembering everything and everyone she’d left behind. Even her house, which had been rented out for the year.
“You aren’t going to meet anyone holed up in your room, sweetheart,” her grandmother said gently. “You need to get out more.”
Courtney didn’t have a single argument. She lowered her eyes. “I know.”
“Come with me and I’ll introduce you around.”
She opened her mouth to object, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. Her grandmother caught her by the hand and dragged Courtney toward the kitchen. The scrambled eggs were on the table and Courtney could’ve sworn they were the same eggs her grandmother had cooked the day before.
“I thought we’d go to the library and then the grocery store and after that, the yarn store.”
In other words, Courtney was being kidnapped.
“I’m ready now, dear, if that’s all right with you.”
“Me, too, Grandma.” The sooner she gave in, the sooner she could get back to her room.
“Let me check to make sure the lock on the front door is turned,” her grandmother said.
Actually, it was a full seven minutes before they left the house. After checking the front door, her grandmother went into the bathroom to refresh her lipstick. Then she decided she shouldn’t leave the eggs out, covered them with a piece of wrinkled plastic and set the plate in the refrigerator, which confirmed Courtney’s suspicions. Those were the same eggs as the day before.
“Are you ready now?” her grandmother asked, as if Courtney was the one holding up the process.
“Anytime you are.”
“Oh!” her grandmother cried. “I nearly forgot my purse,” she said, giggling. “My goodness, I might have locked us out of the house.”
Finally they were outside. The car, parked in the driveway, could’ve been in a museum. From what Courtney’s father had told her, the 1968 Ford Ranch station wagon was in prime condition. Well, it should be. The car was nearly forty years old and had only 72,000 miles on it. The door weighed a ton and creaked when Courtney opened it. Without another word, she slid onto the seat next to her grandmother.
Driving with Vera was not an experience one engaged in willingly. Once she’d started the engine, she turned to Courtney. “Look behind us. Is anyone coming?”
Courtney twisted around. “You’re fine, Grandma.” Then it occurred to her that her grandmother hadn’t asked this out of idle curiosity. “Grandma,” she said, “why didn’t you turn around and look?”
Her grandmother squared her shoulders. “Because I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
“Do you have a hearing problem, child? I can’t turn my head. I have this crick in my neck. It’s been there for twenty years—I never had such pain. The doctor said there’s nothing they can do. Nothing, and so I suffer. I don’t like to complain and I wouldn’t, but since you asked…”
Although the thought of being a passenger while her grandmother drove terrified Courtney, she didn’t say a word. What was the point? She’d managed to avoid car trips for the last few days, but she’d realized her luck couldn’t possibly hold.
Another question occurred to her. “Grandma, what would you do if I wasn’t with you?” Courtney suspected, fearfully, that her grandmother would just put the car in Reverse and gun it.
Tight-lipped, her grandmother adjusted the rearview mirror, using both hands to move it one way and then the other. “That’s what mirrors are for.”
“Oh.”
“Can we leave now?”
Her questions had clearly offended her grandmother. “Sure,” Courtney said with an enthusiasm born of guilt.
Her grandmother half turned to glance at her as they reached the first stoplight. “If you’re concerned about your weight, Courtney, I could help.”
Courtney eyed her suspiciously. “How?”
“Exercise. I swim in the mornings and you could join me and my friends.”
That didn’t sound like much fun, but then exercise wasn’t supposed to be. “I guess.”
“What do you guess?”
“It’s just an expression, Grandma. It means sure, I’d like that.” This was an exaggeration in the extreme, but her grandmother was making an effort to be helpful and Courtney felt she had to respond appropriately.
Their first stop after leaving Queen Anne Hill, the Seattle area where her grandmother lived, was the library, which seemed ultramodern, especially in comparison to Vera’s neighborhood. Her grandmother explained that it had only recently reopened after a renovation. While Vera picked up a reserved book—the latest hardcover romance by a local author—Courtney flipped through Vogue magazines, trying not to despair at all the thin, elegant models. And that was just the ads.
They drove to the grocery store next. Courtney didn’t have the latest census figures for the population of the Seattle Metro area—she was convinced it had to be in the millions—but her grandmother surely knew fifty percent of them. More times than she cared to count, they were waylaid by her grandmother’s friends, former neighbors, a dozen or more people from church, bridge club members…. Courtney must have been introduced to thirty people and she swore that not a single one was under seventy.
“Now Blossom Street,” her grandmother said as Courtney carried the groceries out to the car. “I won’t be long, I promise.”
Courtney bit her tongue to keep from reminding her grandmother that this was what she’d said at the last place. Seven conversations later, they’d driven off and now Vera was working her way into the angled parking space in front of the yarn shop. She rolled an inch or so, slammed on the brake, released it enough to roll another inch, then it was brake time again. Courtney should’ve predicted what would happen, but it blindsided her. Her grandmother’s bumper crashed against the parking meter hard enough to jolt her forward.
