Grandma Visits Us At The Pizza Shop by Timothy C Goodwin

Grandma straightens in her chair and raises a hand to point—

No, not point, she’s aiming a finger at dad—sitting next to her—the way a ghost in a movie points a curse/prophecy, her twig finger in close-up as it moves through the squeak of the pizza oven door and the gurgling surf of the soda machine, closer, closer, until…Grandma pushes my father’s glasses up the bridge of his nose.

Pause.

Then: There she is (that’s my aunt) there’s mom, always wanting us to look our best, and our laughter tries to prove we didn’t actually think she was about to drop a curse/prophecy. Grandma’s visits are fewer and farther apart: sometimes noncommital, sometimes hectic.

My cousin—in from wherever my cousin lives and suggesting this improvised family reunion—leans towards her to delicately ask how her pizza is, now that she’s here-here, looking to treat anything from her like a precious stone, this iron woman of familial legend who once single-handedly lassoed the dock up at the cottage to drag it ashore when a storm had knocked it loose, who years and years ago plucked the peanut butter jar this same cousin had left for dead and scraped two more sandwiches worth out of while saying I grew up in the Depression, the Hello There that people think I took from Obi-Wan.

But Grandma simply lowers her hand and sinks back, and sinks away, to gaze at a slice of veggie pizza we all know she’ll never finish.

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