9

The All-Night Senior Party started at ten o’clock. It was almost nine by the time I finished showering and threw on jeans. Then a T-shirt. A faded blue one with the University of Michigan logo on the back. Taylor used to say it made her sad when I wore it because it reminded her we weren’t going to the same schools in the fall. Of course, this was before she broke up with me in April and started going out with Nishesh, who was the biggest douchebag in the class. That’s just by the numbers. The next guy who goes out with your ex-girlfriend is always a douchebag.

Nishesh was okay. Kind of a nice guy. He obviously made Taylor happy. She was still with him.

Douchebag.

I just sat down at my desk when I heard, “Briggs dear,” in that flint-edged voice that sent me bolt upright out of my chair, slamming my knees on the underside of my desk and knocking over the Detroit Tigers mug I kept pens and pencils in.

“Hi, Grandma Ruth. How are you?” I said, giving her my best Grandma Ruth Smile as she air-kissed my cheek and ignored my question.

“Come downstairs,” she ordered me. “I have something for you.”

She hadn’t changed clothes since graduation. She hadn’t changed wardrobes since Reagan was president. She wore a standard uniform of starched white shirt, navy blazer, khakis, loafers, and she buttoned her shirts right up to the top, where they almost touched a flap of loose skin she was forever trying to smooth away with the back of her hand. When I was little, I asked her all the time if I could touch it. She let me do it once when I was four. It was the softest thing on her.

Her hair was white at the temples, gray everywhere else, and her lips were bright red from drinking the blood of small children who had the nerve to ring her doorbell on Halloween. It was a nice house and big, but dark on holidays and had stickers in every window warning trespassers that This Property Is Under 24-Hour Surveillance.

I started to follow her downstairs.

“Clean up your desk first,” she said, and I obeyed because that’s what you do with dictators. “A tidy home is the sign of a tidy mind.” She started out the door. “And a tidy mind rejects untidy ideas.”

Not once in my life had I ever heard this woman laugh. Given that she raised my dad, it was no wonder he found “You need a haircut” hilarious.

I followed Grandma Ruth into the kitchen, which was so much nicer than our last one. Brighter too. Even with Grandma Ruth there darkening it. Dad sat at the island. Mom leaned against the far counter, drinking coffee. Our last house was a shoebox. You couldn’t have fit four people in the kitchen, and there was no island in it.

On the floor near my dad stood a box, about three and a half feet high, wrapped in brown-and-blue-striped paper with a brown-and-blue bow on top. Leave it to Grandma Ruth to find poo-colored wrapping paper.

I opened the box, at her command, and pulled out a . . . pulled out a . . .

“It’s a Ficus,” she said.

“A Ficus,” I repeated.

“Technically it’s a Ficus benjamina or weeping fig, but I didn’t think you’d know it by either of those names.”

“Yeah. No. Ficus is all I need to know.”

“Well, how about that, son,” Dad said in his best stand-up comic voice. “You don’t already have one of those, do you?”

“No, I don’t. Thanks, Grandma Ruth,” I said, and didn’t even have to fake enthusiasm because this was just a riot.

“I want you to take it to school with you,” she said. “Put it in your dorm room and learn to care for it.” She turned to my mother. “If he kills it, at least it’s just a tree. And not terribly valuable. Not like jewelry.”

Mom took a huge swig of coffee. Somewhere in our previous two moves, she lost a pair of earrings Grandma Ruth had given her. Since then Grandma Ruth only gave her jars of grape jelly on her birthday and at Christmas. Mom wrote thank-you notes for the “treat” and spooned the stuff into the toilet. She smiled and smiled watching it swirl around the bowl.

Grandma Ruth handed me two pieces of paper and said, “I’ve written the care instructions for you.” Typed. With subheadings. “If you manage not to kill it, then when you graduate, I want you to plant it in the backyard so that it will remind you of me after I’m dead.”

“Yeah, you are already unforgettable, Grandma Ruth,” I said.

“Everyone is forgettable eventually,” she said.

“Well, I promise that every time I see a Ficus—any Ficus, not just this Ficus—I will think of you.”

“Is that sarcasm, Briggs? You know I don’t like sarcasm. No one likes sarcasm,” she said.

“I mean it sincerely,” I said in that voice I reserved just for her—like You know I’m bullshitting you, of course I’m bullshitting you, but come on, it’s a game, life’s a game, loosen up. I was determined to get the woman to play a little. Just once in her life. But, man, she was work.

“You and Ficuses,” I said, and held up two crossed fingers. “Inseparable in my mind from now on.”

“Sarcasm is rude,” she said.

“Right,” I said.

My stomach started to cramp again. It had been quite a day.

“Well, take it up to your room and water it,” she said. “I didn’t give it to your mother, so don’t make her look after it.” To Mom, she said, “You over-water everything, and the beds out front show it. If it dies”—she looked at me—“I want to know whom to blame.”

“You’ll know, Ruth,” Mom said, and polished off the coffee in her mug.

I made a mental note to nurture that damn plant into a forest, since I was fairly certain I had no smile in my repertoire that would compensate for killing it, and I would never—absolutely never—hear the end of it from Grandma Ruth. With her dying breath, she would say to me, “I was going to leave you everything, Briggs, if only you had taken care of that plant.” She’d point at me. Her eyes would bug. “Ficus killer,” she’d say, then leave this world for the next, mad as hell for all eternity.