I am at my grandparents’ house, in the service room, and it is late. We’ve just finished some sort of game, laughing and feasting the way we always do. I climb the squeaky steps to the kitchen, and there is a giant glass box with one remaining bit of food. I snap the lid off to take a bite. Grandma comes in, startling me, and maybe I put it back. I don’t remember.
She tells me she is going for a run, something she has never done, and I worry for her. It is one in the morning and so very dark. Undeterred, she puts on a turquoise track suit and starts down the street with me following just behind, a halo of light around her steadily moving body. Her old neighbor, jogging in navy plaid pajamas, slows to watch Grandma run. I see glimpses of brick and shiny tiles from buildings she passes.
In a flash, we are in the car, the LTD of my childhood, forest green seats and smelling of pipe tobacco. Grandpa is driving. It is winter now, snow all around and icy roads. We’re delivering packages to friends of my grandparents, sneaking around in the dark so they won’t catch us.
Along the way, we pass a collection of red brick smoke stacks in the shape of nuclear power stations. They are arranged in trios and are steaming madly. I can see pipes all along the snow covered ground, a crazy patchwork, connected hither and thither, with flames occasionally shooting from the seams. It is all very ethereal and lovely, the sky turning to greet the morning, and I ask where we are. Grandma tells me that it is a short cut Frances taught her, like it is any old route. I utter, “It’s so beautiful. Why didn’t she ever show me?”
Grandpa turns off the highway and closer to the flaming pipes, frightening me, and I tell him so. He soothes me, but it turns out to be a lie because a pipe frissons as soon as the words are out of his mouth. The flame burns my skin, hot on my left side. I look over, and my heart flutters to see Aunt Mary lying on the seat next to me, swaddled and sleeping in a white blanket, her grey hair fresh from a visit to the beauty parlor.
Grandpa gets back on the highway and it curves like a velodrome before we are back at the first house we visited, one more gift to hide inside the screen door. Grandma ties it shut with a ribbon, and we’re off again. We sputter on the ice, and the car is momentarily airborne before Grandpa rights us on the road.
Aunt Mary wakes from her slumber, purses her lips in that way she always did before smiling sleepily at me. She’s going to say something. I can feel it with an ache in my bones, but the raccoon outside the window has other designs, and I wake up. Grateful and misty eyed.
The hubster is stirring now, too. I tell him the dream, crying a little, him squeezing my hand. He knows my soft ways.