Place Value

After Katrina drowned their house on the Gulf, Teddy’s grandparents came north and moved in with Teddy and his mother in Chicago. They only had the four suitcases, and his grandmother tried to sound playful when she announced they were in a homeless state. But that was okay because she loved Teddy’s city where you could get anything any time, including culture, which she said she planned to consume like shrimp or lump crabmeat at least three times a day. Tears came to her eyes when she said the word crabmeat.

Teddy and his mother lived in a modern steel and glass building overlooking Lake Michigan. His grandparents slept in the guestroom Teddy’s father had used as an office. After the divorce, his father moved to New York because he had gotten an even better job, and it was assumed, a better life. He was very good at managing money, Teddy’s mother explained to Teddy once, not so good at managing people. She said this in such a way that made the ice in her glass shift.

After they moved in, Teddy’s grandfather mostly talked on the phone to the insurance people and watched the news alone, staring at replays of the pink and red swirls that had been the hurricane paths Teddy learned about in science. Over dinner Teddy listened to the three of them talk about the water and food that was not getting delivered, the trees and concrete that wasn’t getting moved in the two weeks that had already passed.

Then Teddy’s grandfather told Teddy’s mother what she had to do – she had to go down and see what, if anything, could be salvaged. Teddy watched his mother nod as though she were in a dream. Teddy’s mother had never volunteered for anything – not even for bake sales or car washes at his school. She said other mothers could do that sort of thing, not her.

To ready herself to go to Mississippi in a convoy of volunteers the following week, his mother cut her hair so that she looked as though she were wearing a black swim cap. She wore jeans and t-shirts, and she told people it was her duty to see about her parents’ home and their hometown, maybe do some good down there. Teddy wondered what his mother could possibly do that Catch could not.

The night before his mother left, Teddy’s grandmother sat at the dining room table, her blue-grey hair dull now and shaggy. His grandmother looked tired as she held out a big set of keys for his mother, explaining which key went to which door and where to find everything like the silver, the china, the paintings, and the photographs.

His grandfather came and sat too, then laid a gun there on the glass table. Teddy had never seen a gun up close before, but this one with the wooden handle looked like something a pirate would have used.

His mother carefully picked up the gun with a paper napkin, and took it back to her room to pack in her bag along with bandages, rubbing alcohol, breathing masks, dry foods and other supplies. Teddy had seen the T.V. news about all the survivors with guns down there. People shot at each other for ice. He couldn’t help but wonder and worry. Did his mother know how to wrap a wound? Did she know how to shoot?

After his mother left, Teddy went to school every day, then, with his grandparents, he watched New Orleans unravel nightly on the T.V. news. His mother was gone three days before she called. Nothing, not even the cell phones, were working. Getting fuel was a problem too. When at last she came back safe after a week, carrying only a few silver pieces and some forks and knives in a damp, dirty Choctow basket, she was quiet and pale. She said she needed a long hot shower and a good meal.

They gathered together in the living room, a formal, carpeted, all-beige room Teddy and his mother hardly ever used. His mother gave Teddy’s grandfather the gun and his grandmother the keys. She needed neither, she said, because everything, including the doors, and mostly everybody was gone. “Just gone,” she said again and again, her eyes welling up. “Nothing to open, no one to shoot.” She told them as best she could about the miles of downed trees and flattened houses and how the entire town was gone, really, and how stretches of their street were now torn up chunks of concrete. She showed them dim, fuzzy pictures in her digital camera.

Teddy’s mother was wrong. It wasn’t all just gone. The pale yellow house was there, but just. It was a ruined, empty shell with no floors, no walls, no furniture and half a roof. In the camera, Teddy could only make out a lot of wood, dirt, mold and water. He couldn’t recognize anything. One minute his mother couldn’t speak, the next minute she shook, full of energy. He watched her and his grandparents cry, remembering their home, the pool, the rose garden, the badminton, the hydrangea bushes from the wedding, the beach, the shrimp boats, the pelicans, the neighbors.

It was hard for Teddy to picture the real hurricane, the one that was not the red and pink swirls on the T.V. weatherman’s computer screen. He understood the water getting high and how it got inside the house, but he couldn’t picture that water on his grandmother’s light blue carpet or her things floating around, pushing themselves out into more water. He knew that while he sat at his desk at school, people like Catch had survived Katrina by being clever and getting to higher ground, but he also knew that people died, that the ropes broke loose at the harbor, and the boats had all floated away, some into the tops of trees where they were later found stuck. Now there were all those people down there, stuck too, eating Army food, then going to the bathroom in plastic bags.

Teddy’s grandmother looked towards Teddy who was still trying to imagine the hurricane so that he could make himself cry along with the others. He was sad, he supposed, but he was not crying and he wondered if that was a problem. His grandmother wiped her face with a Kleenex and said, “Oh now, let’s pull ourselves together. It was just a house. We’re still here.”

“But it’s all gone,” Teddy’s mother repeated. “The house, the town, the church. The credenza, Momma. All your beautiful furniture.”

His grandmother got up and sat next to Teddy. She put her arm around his shoulders and pulled him close enough so that he could smell the sherry on her breath. His grandmother was old, but not old old. Not smelly old. She had a sturdier build then his mother and her skin smelled of soap and hand cream, not perfume. “We’re all going to be fine.”

Weeks after her trip to the gulf coast, Teddy would often see his mother standing in the middle of a room, unable to recall what she had been doing. She seemed incapable of completing sentences. She couldn’t focus. This was the word his grandmother used. Focus. Judging from his mother’s bad photography, Teddy thought it was the correct word. Then his mother was gone first for one night, then two, then for a whole week, staying with a friend in Hyde Park, a smart man who taught Physics at “You of See.”

The Saturday morning his mother left for her trip to Canada with her friend, who was in fact her new boyfriend, Teddy stood before her as she packed.

“Do you like him more then you liked Dad?”

His mother stopped packing, her hand still on top of the blue nightgown she only wore on special occasions like Christmas.

“Not more. I like him different.”

Her eyes were the color of the nightgown and he wondered if she and this professor talked about quantum theories and black holes. Teddy did not know why his parents divorced. They had not gotten along but they were together, now they were no longer together. Before was before. Now was now. It was as basic as 3-1=2. He just wanted to know what that one thing was that caused the togetherness to break, because he was sure that it – that one thing that added up to divorce - was something as concrete as the numerical equations he was learning in math.

When his mother came to kiss him, he waved her away because of her sour, coffee-breath and she laughed, kissing him again and again while he held his own breath, wondering if this lack of oxygen affected his brain. When his mother finally stopped trying to kiss him, she looked past him. It was not a look that Teddy knew. She was not focusing. She was not thinking of him. She got up and closed her suitcases.

Teddy’s grandmother sorted laundry while trying to make up a poem about folding Teddy into her life. She tried to smile as she struggled through her made-up rhymes and asked what he would like for lunch.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh fiddlesticks,” she said, hugging her to him. “We’ll make do.”

After they saw Teddy’s mother off, and she was gone, Teddy and his grandparents went out for steaks and frites, and afterwards stopped at a drugstore to buy brand new toothbrushes.

For a while then everything was perfect.

Teddy and his grandmother went everywhere together. Teddy showed her where bloody battles had been fought along Dearborn. He told her how they were sitting on one of the great divides, one of the continental divides. She took him to the symphony, where he listened to the music while staring at the rows and rows of different colored hair on the pale necks in front of them. At intermission, they drank root beers and she showed him the cha cha and the Charleston, then when everyone stopped looking, she said she thought they should both learn to play the violin.

Nastasia lived in their building, right down the hall from them, except that she had no view of the lake. She was tall, thin, and Russian with bangs and a fat cat. For the first month, Teddy and his grandmother held cigar boxes under their chins because Nastasia said they had to make ready to play. The day they finally played, Nastasia’s cat began to weave in and out of their legs as they stood and plucked at the strings, single notes that even Teddy recognized as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” After the humiliation of the cigar boxes, Teddy thought this was everything now—to be holding the violin tucked just so beneath his chin, and even though they were using their fingers and not the bow, he could hear a song, the song they were taught to play.

At the end of their thirty minutes, Teddy’s grandmother put down her violin, found her wallet from her purse and counted out the cash while Nastasia scribbled something unreadable on the tops of their sheet music, nodding towards the bowl of Dum-Dums on her file cabinet, saying to Teddy what she always said in her low Russian accent, “Take candy.”

Back home, at their place down the hall, the night they had learned “Twinkle Twinkle,” the living room smelled of something alcoholic and his grandfather was asleep in the green chair in front of the T.V. news, his newspapers all around him. The President was standing in front of a lit-up blueish Jackson Square in New Orleans.

“He doesn’t deserve to be standing there,” his grandmother whispered, bending to straighten the newspapers and when she and Teddy both saw the gun on the floor, she quickly wrapped it with the papers, then told Teddy to go do his homework. He went to his room, glancing back to see his grandmother reappear without the gun, the walls flashing with the light of the TV screen.

That year, his fifth grade year, Teddy’s classroom smelled of pencil shavings, not crayons. He sat behind a new girl named Amy who wore her long brown hair in a ponytail that trailed onto the surface of his desk. He would at times color the ends of her hair with a yellow highlighter.

At his desk he read: finding the square root of a number is the inverse operation of squaring that number. The square root of a number is that number times itself. Square roots of objects other than numbers can also be defined.

Teddy worked his worksheet, then got up and stood before his teacher sitting at her desk. He gave her the worksheet. Slow-moving wasps crawled around the tips of the pens and pencils in a jar. Teddy knew his teacher didn’t much care for him. He overheard her once say to another teacher in the teacher’s lounge that she wondered if he – if Teddy was border-line autistic because he barely showed any emotion, that he was a just-the-facts-kind-of boy, and would never be able to read between the lines of anything.

“Just ignore them,” his teacher said of the wasps, looking up from her grade book, stuffing a Kleenex inside the sleeve of her sweater. His teacher always had a cold.

Amy looked up as Teddy passed her desk. She was not yet halfway through her own worksheet on division.

“I like your braces,” she said.

He ran his tongue across his front teeth. “Yeah?”

She nodded, and as he sat back down, he couldn’t help but touch the tips of her hair.

He opened the same book he checked out of the school library once a week, the newest edition of Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not. He stared at the picture of the Wyandotte chicken that had survived thirty days without its head, only to choke to death on a corn kernel in an Arizona motel. It was a mystery to Teddy and also grotesque and he hoped it was alright that he stared and stared the way he did at all the pictures of other unexpected grotesques like the most pierced man, Luis Aguero with 230 piercings on his body and head. The pictures in the book made him both delighted and off-balanced. He felt badly for staring, and even vaguely nauseous by what he saw, but he could not help but look and then look some more. It thrilled him to see and to know that such things, such events, such people and animals existed. It made him think of unexplainable possibilities.

In fifth grade, recess was called gym, and afterwards, at lunch, Amy sat down next to him and whispered, “Where’s the state of emergency?” She said that she had heard that Teddy’s grandparents had come up from Mississippi after the hurricane, and in the news, she kept hearing about this state of emergency. Teddy explained as best he could, and afterwards, Amy reached under the table and put her hand on his knee, telling him that her parents had made a significant donation to the Red Cross. Teddy was not sure what to say, and he could not think clearly with her hand there on his leg.

“Thank you,” he said.

Teddy and his grandparents ate breakfast and dinner together and his grandfather had to have his bread on a bread plate, which his grandmother provided, and there most certainly had to be meat of some sort, not mixed or cooked up into anything with rice or nuts or dried fruit, just meat which his grandmother said was easy enough. His grandfather said next to nothing as they ate, and his grandmother touched his grandfather’s hand frequently.

After four weeks, when his mother still had not come home, Teddy grew afraid of the dark in his room, especially the dark in his closet. His grandmother said nothing about this, and always at night, after dinner, accompanied him to bed, humming whatever song they had just learned from Nastasia.

He had a good idea of what his father would have said to all this business with the dark. Nonsense. His father believed in money and electronics. His father had not called since his mother had left for Canada.

One night Teddy came up with the idea of calling each of his parents on the phone, and then when their machines played, because they never ever answered their phones, Teddy and his grandmother would play a song on their violins, leaving the recordings on their voice mail.

He and his grandmother did this only when they had a new song to play, and that night, they played “Swallowtail Jig.” They called his father first, leaving the song on the machine. Then after Teddy hung up, he dialed his mother’s cell phone, knowing that the tune and the notes would give him something to think about when his grandmother eventually turned off his bedroom light.

But his mother interrupted their play by actually answering her phone. She said Hi to Teddy and he was not sure if her voice waved because of her mood or their uncertain connection. She complimented him on his musical ability. He told her briefly about school and that he was getting really good at math and he knew this because it was not difficult for him, not like it was for the others in his class. She asked to speak with Teddy’s grandmother.

Teddy watched his grandmother hold the phone to her ear, nodding her head, touching the ugly cactus that had not grown one inch in four years in its plastic pot on his bureau. She walked the room, picking up books and clothes he’d left on the floor, twirling the globe round once, then rattling the little jar half filled with Teddy’s baby teeth. She’d had her hair colored darker at some salon on Michigan Avenue and she looked more like his mother used to look.

When she hung up, Teddy asked his grandmother what his mother had said. She told him his mother would be a little while longer in Canada.

“How much longer?”

His grandmother pulled the sheets up to his chin, then kissed the top of his head as though he was still just a boy and not ten years old. “I can’t rightly tell. But we’ll make do.” She sounded so southern then.

That night Teddy overheard his grandparents talking in their guest room. His grandfather was saying that he’d had enough of their daughter, that all her life they’d worried about her even though they’d done everything for her, sent her to private schools, Sunday school, bought her nice clothes, and now here she was, a divorcee, running around Canada with an academic commie named Ivan.

“Ivan the Terrible,” his grandfather said.

“She’s forty-nine,” his grandmother sighed. “She’s just going through something.”

“She’s a grown woman with a child. We’ve got our own worries.”

His grandmother picked him up after school in a cab the following day, then headed for The Art Institute where she said she needed to find a statue so that she could sit and look at it. In Gallery 271, they settled on a bench in front of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain.

“She doesn’t have a face,” Teddy said.

“Probably just as well,” his grandmother said, slipping off her shoes. She was tired. Teddy had overheard her say to his grandfather that morning that she didn’t want to hear anymore about insurance companies, flood, wind, or mold damage. She didn’t want to talk about that house anymore. She had said that house as though it was any house, and not the yellow home in front of the Gulf, in the town, the place they had loved.

She read out the information from the plaque. The Art Deco sculpture was the model for the big one on top of the Board of Trade building.

“That’s where Dad used to work,” Teddy said.

“She’s the patron saint of traders,” his grandmother said, pointing to the sheaf of wheat in Ceres’ hand, which had no fingers, just lines suggesting them. “The wheat has more detail then she does.”

His grandmother sighed and said that Ceres was a disappointment, more silver column than woman. While she talked, she rubbed perfume on her wrists from a free trial bottle, then straightened the scarf around her neck. His grandmother wore the one good scarf she came to Chicago with when they went out. It was a silky blue, the color of her eyes, with yellow flowers and a border that looked like rain. She said that Ceres’ straight back and her hair up in a bun like that made her look more British than Roman. Too slick and devoid of emotion, she said, sounding tired and sad.

“The Romans called her Ceres. The Greeks called her Demeter. Her daughter, Persephone disappeared one day while gathering flowers. Suddenly the ground split open and Hades came with dark horses and captured her, plunging them both back into the ground where he had an underground palace. He sat her on a throne of black marble, decked her out in gold and precious stones, then offered her a pomegranate. He was a good host. At first she refused to eat, but what can I say? She got hungry. She ate the fruit of the dead. Big mistake. Meanwhile on earth, the willows wept and there were no more flowers or fruit because her mother, Ceres, was so distraught.”

“So that’s our winter?”

She hugged him. “Such a brilliant boy. I do like to watch you think.”

“But it’s just a story.”

“Makes all the sense in the world to me. Ceres cuts a deal with Zeus, Persophone’s dad. He said Persophone had to live with Hades for one month for each pomegranate seed she had eaten. Then she could come back up to earth. When mother and daughter were together, the earth was warm and bore fruit.”

“Grandmother?” He knew what he had to say would be a disappointment. He did not want to appear to be shallow or stupid, but his head ached.

“I’m hungry.”

She laughed and said that he was wonderful. “Oh you’re so brilliant and interesting and wonderful,” she said, saying his name in the nicest way, and he knew then that if this was true what she said, if he really was brilliant and interesting and wonderful, then she was too, but more so because she was his grandmother, the root of their square.

They went to a café across the street and his eyes watered from walking into the cold wind. His grandmother asked the waiter to turn off the TV news about FEMA and they talked about how his parents had met at a party. “It was hard knowing my only daughter was going to move to Chicago, but he was considered a catch,” she said of his father. “He was a good provider.” She told Teddy about the wedding parties she called showers they had all along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and into New Orleans. His grandmother appeared happy to remember the house as it once was and herself as a younger woman and Teddy was happy to know more about his parents. Neither one of them mentioned the divorce. Outside their window, Teddy could see the wind freezing puddles of water into alligator shapes on the street.

They quickly advanced to “Harvest Home.” They used their bows now too, and one day Nastasia picked up her violin and played with them. She played full chords. How could he not notice the difference? When would they be able to learn to play like that? When would she teach them how to shake their fingers too? Hearing Nastasia play, more than anything, Teddy wanted it all right then, not just this song, but the shaking, the full sound, the wholer song.

Nastasia stopped playing to line up his fingers, which she called his animals.

“They are not in their pens. What happened to doggy? He’s going into Kitty’s yard. Animals, they are stupid. You in charge. Be angry with animals. You must discipline. You must be strict so they get as smart as you.”

Teddy put down his violin. “When can we learn a real song? Like the ones you play.”

Nastasia looked at him, then at his grandmother who only shrugged.

“There is the Christmas concert,” Nastasia started, flipping through the sheet music on their stands, passing the baby stuff with all the elaborate cats and dogs she’d drawn with colored pencils. She stopped at one page then played the first few stanzas. His grandmother inhaled.

“That’s what they played at my daughter’s wedding at our home in Mississippi.” She read the title on the page. “But I thought it was Vivaldi’s ‘Spring.’” She sounded young again. Happy.

“Ha!” Nastasia said, picking up their bows. “No no, it’s Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Slow and beautiful, but just say piece of cake, then it will be easy and your mind will follow and all your animals will stay in yards.” Nastasia showed them how to better hold the bow with the pinky just so. She called the pinky a rabbit and told them not to kill their rabbits. “OK? Nobody dead? Animals well behaved? You strong? Be bright. Be brave. Be expressive.”

Nastasia had them hold their violins to their chins, bows in place while she counted in Russian. Teddy stood up straight beside his grandmother. They both smiled at one another as if they knew a secret. He could have stood beside his grandmother like that for a lifetime.

Then all at once everything changed.

Teddy and his grandmother had finished practicing their canon one night reminding each other to keep their animals loosen. They laughed in the kitchen preparing dinner, imitating Nastasia’s Russian accent. “Don’t play into your stomach,” his grandmother said. “Keep beautiful.”

“Be bright, be brave, be expressive,” he said. “Take candy.”

Teddy’s grandfather was on the phone with the insurance company, his face reddening as he listened. Fighting with the insurance company was his new full-time job. That’s what Teddy’s grandmother said. His grandfather had even laughed when she said this, and he had said “What else am I gonna do with all this time but argue with them on whether or not this was wind or water damage?”

“We have to make a decision,” Teddy’s grandfather said. His hair looked to be getting whiter. “Sell or rebuild.”

“Holey moley,” his grandmother said. Teddy put Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the CD player. “Spring” was playing. “Do we really have to decide that now?”

After dinner, his grandmother said she was tired. The day and all this talk of hurricane damage gave her pain that ran across her back. His grandfather looked at her then and said her color was off. He offered to call their doctor, but he wasn’t sure if he was in Texas now or Louisiana. Teddy walked with her to the guestroom.

“There aren’t many birds here in the city, are there?” his grandmother said, sitting there on the edge of the bed. They could hear the strong, cold wind outside coming off the lake, whistling through the windows. “You know my brother, your great uncle helped build the sea wall along the Mississippi gulf coast at the beginning of the century. Every house in Pass Christian had its own pier back then. You could fish at the end and catch crabs. Everything I loved was down there.”

Teddy looked at her, knowing how much she must be missing her home. She was inside here, when he knew she should have been outside there, in Mississippi, walking the porch before she slept, the way she liked. Once, at a shrimp boil on the beach at the Fourth of July bonfire, she taught him how to light up the end of a stick, and with the sparks, they wrote their names in the air, that and hello. He had only been five or six then, and when they looked up at the night sky, he had said communicating which made her laugh.

“I’m sorry you lost your house,” he said.

“You’re an angel is what you are,” she said, motioning him to her, hugging him close and tight. “My perfect angel.”

He flapped his hands like wings and tried to make her laugh.

“Don’t be stiffy,” he said with his Russian accent.

He was still asleep when they came all at once at dawn, rolling her out to the hall on a gurney and then into the elevator, down to the lobby, and into an ambulance, which he could not ride. He and his grandfather followed in a cab.

At the hospital, the doctor, a squat man with brown eyes, came out too quickly from the emergency room. He said she died – he said that word, died, of heart failure, the sort of thing that so often goes undetected in women her age. Without thinking, Teddy brought his grandfather’s hand to his lips and kissed the tips of his grandfather’s fingers. His grandfather only stared at the doctor who continued to say things they did not hear. Teddy looked at the linoleum floor, then at the pay phone down the hall.

When they went back to the apartment, Teddy couldn’t make sense of anything. All the rooms still smelled of the chicken dinner he and his grandmother cooked the night before. He was cold, and he allowed his teeth to rattle.

Then his mother came home, and when Teddy saw her at the door with her suitcases, he saw a woman, not his mother. Her hair had grown out so that the salt and pepper sides blew back like feathers. She looked less thin, sturdier. He saw not Mom then but Dianne, and for a moment he realized she would never be able to talk with him, not in the way his grandmother had. She would only be Dianne. He understood this and he pushed this new knowledge of his mother into the back of his mind, so that later, he would re-examine it in his room, alone, and figure out what to do about it.

She stepped forward, stopped, then reached into her purse and gave him a piece of chocolate which, when he opened later was old and grey. He hugged her, then stepped back to let her in, as though they were on a date and it was his apartment.

“I know I shouldn’t be hungry, but I am.” She was using the voice she used when she spoke to him in front of other people. “Is it asking too much for someone to pour me a Scotch?”

His mother was on the phone most of the time, making so many arrangements, telling people, sharing her worries about her father. It wasn’t supposed to happen. For days she said so. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Teddy’s grandmother was supposed to be the one who lived on and on, in her house, on the coast. Teddy’s grandfather mostly stayed in the guest room and said nothing.

One morning, while Teddy and his grandfather ate cereal, Teddy’s mother hung up the phone and announced to them that they could not bury Teddy’s grandmother in Pass Christian, Mississippi – the hurricane had demolished the cemetery and they were having enough trouble with the bodies that had already been buried there. The water had pushed up caskets into the streets.

The hurricane had gone and washed through his grandparents’ home and now it felt as though it was washing through their lives again. This storm had grabbed hold of them and wouldn’t let go.

The night before the funeral, Teddy sat up in his bed and put in front of him a book with a cloaked figure on the cover. He could not make sense of the words. He closed the book and looked out the window at the sky and a rooftop. He pretended that there was a bare tree there, with a bird on the branch, and he pretended that the bird was his pet and that the bird could understand everything he said and thought.

When his mother came to kiss him goodnight, he didn’t wave her away.

“You’re not going to marry him, are you?” he asked her.

“Oh God. I don’t know, Teddy.” She sat on the edge of his bed making him roll closer. They stayed that way, without saying anything.

“Let’s just get through this, okay?” his mother said.

On the way to the visitation in the backseat of the cab Teddy sat between his grandfather and his mother who pulled Teddy close, and asked him if he was all right. Even though it was snowing, Teddy reached over and put the windows down to feel the cold air. It was full winter. The trees were black, naked limbs and now the snow was wrapping them up in white blankets. On his black glove, the snowflakes were all different up close, each one wonderful. He knew that if he continued to look out the window and examine snowflakes, his mother would stop asking him questions.

He crossed and recrossed himself. He buttoned and unbuttoned his good jacket. He stood before the open casket where his grandmother lay with her sprayed hair and her pinkened arms. He was glad his mother had thought to put the blue scarf around her neck, the way she liked it tied when she was about to set out on a new cultural adventure. If he stayed there long enough, she would open her eyes, turn to him and tell him again what a brilliant boy he was, her perfect angel.

Teddy considered this word aftermath. His grandmother was after math. 2-1=1. His grandmother had been so much like him, but older. They were each other times two.

Teddy tipped back and forth on his heels when he spoke with any of the adults, thanking them when they put dollar bills into his coat jacket, smiling politely when they complimented him on his behavior. He knew they liked children to be quiet. He had nothing to say to them anyway.

His mother introduced him to her boyfriend who was really a man named Ivan with bushy eyebrows who called himself an astrophysicist. He told Teddy that he had a dog, named Syntax. Teddy’s father would have made fun of the eyebrows. Teddy missed his father. His father could not make it to the funeral and it was as though he were avoiding another holiday.

“Let’s make a deal,” the astrophysicist said. “Whatever you can’t Google, you can ask me.”

Outside snow was falling. Christmas was coming. His grandmother was not there to ask him what he would like. She would not be there when he turned twelve or even twenty. There would be no more cards. Teddy did not know what to make of any of it. To Teddy it had seemed all of them would go on living as they had been living, and their house would always be there, anchored in a town that never aged, and his grandmother would go on forever, watching him go on forever. Infinite. The term from Teddy’s math book, Place Value came to mind. In the decimal system, the value of a digit depends on its place. If they were the digits, then they would be changed now because their place and so much of what they had been was destroyed.

His mother led him to a kitchen in the back of the funeral home where there were sandwiches made with wet turkey. His mother fixed him a plate, but he could not eat. He only poked at the food. There were other children there for another funeral. They sat on the floor eating jellybeans and chips. He did and did not want to join them. His grandmother used to play with him on the floor of her living room on the coast in Mississippi, after they had played in the sand on the beach in front of their house, the house that had drowned. On the floor of her living room on the coast, she never said Not now, honey and they built buildings with Legos, put puzzles of fish together, rolled cars, and made windmills from Tinker Toy sticks.

The other funeral was for a child. There were colored balloons instead of flowers and long lines of people with their own, living children coming in from the cold. To Teddy, it somehow made sense that there was a child in a coffin and his grandmother in another and that they were in the same funeral home. Teddy knew that his grandmother would help the child find her way. His grandmother was like that. In his mind, Teddy could see his grandmother taking the girl’s hand, stopping traffic to cross a street hanging on a cloud made of spun sugar. The child and his grandmother would sing a song they had learned from Nastasia. Grasshopper grasshopper, they would sing. His grandmother would teach the girl. His grandmother would enjoy watching the girl think. For that moment, Teddy wished he was the dead girl.

His mother had asked him to bring along a book because she said it would be a long day. Teddy found his Ripleys’ Believe It or Not, brought it to a table and sat down, opening the book to a picture of the smallest waist on a living person, Cathie Jung Usa, who at 5 foot 8 inches tall had a 15-inch waist. Teddy turned back to the page with the longest surviving headless chicken named Mike. Mike’s owner, Lloyd Olsen fed and watered the headless chicken directly into his gullet with an eyedropper. Teddy stared at the words that made the story that continued to defy logic. There was no mention of Katrina in Ripley’s. Maybe the hurricane would make it into the next edition. Maybe not. Anything was possible.

Sitting there in the kitchen at the funeral home, Teddy looked up from his Believe It or Not and he saw the girl he knew to be Amy. She wore her hair down and pushed back behind her ears. She walked straight towards him, then stopped and said, “I’m so sorry about your grandmother.” Her eyes were a watery light blue.

His throat tightened and his eyes were stinging, and as he stood up, his chair fell back and he didn’t bother to right it. He took one step towards her -- it only took one step—and he put his arms around her and he breathed in her orange candy smell as he held her so close that his lips touched the soft hairs at the nape of her neck.

During mass the following day, the elderly priest could not find his place in the Bible. He looked the way his father used to look when he couldn’t find his tax records. The priest who no longer looked like a priest, but rather like a scared man in a bathrobe, flipped through the Bible in front of him. No one said anything. They could all hear the splutter of candles. Finally, they watched as he carefully read through what looked to be the Table of Contents until at last he found what he was looking for, smiled, flipped to the page, looked up, nodded, and began speaking in his priest voice, using his priest face, looking like a priest again.

When it was his turn, Teddy stood up and went to the alter himself where he played from memory Pachelbel’s Canon in D which his grandmother had thought was Vivaldi. He made every attempt to play bright and brave. His fingers were not stiffy and all through the allegro, he made his animals behave and the cat and the dog stayed in their own yards and he was able to shake his fingers just so to make the notes come out loud and clear and strong. He did not look up from his violin when he heard people sniffing. He stayed focused.

After the mass and after the funeral, and finally after the long luncheon, they stayed at the banquet hall near the forest preserve next to the cemetery where they laid his grandmother into the dark hole, and buried her in the frozen ground. He could not stop thinking of her there, inside that cold hole. He hoped she would meet up with a good host. She deserved an underground palace too, one with a throne of black marble like Cere’s daughter had.

It had stopped snowing and the night was lit up with all the white. Inside, his grandfather and his mother stayed seated at the big table as the others left. They ordered themselves another drink and discussed how much everything cost. Their voices grew louder.

Teddy went outside alone, past the parking lot, towards the edge of the woods. He began to hum the real Vivaldi concerto softly to himself. He found a patch of unbroken snow. He turned around careful to stay in his own footprints, then crouched and slowly sat back into the snow. He lay down flat and fit his body into the snow, snugly, the snow crunching as he did this. They had buried his grandmother that day and he had held Amy the day before, and he had no one to tell, but he recognized that it still happened. He lay there. He closed his eyes and concentrated, humming the concerto louder now, as he moved his arms up and down, his legs out and back, leaving his angel mark. He stopped moving and he stopped humming too, and for a soft moment he stayed like that, thinking on the notes of “Spring.”