Thank You for All Things by Sandra Kring

Author:Sandra Kring [Kring, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-553-90562-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

chapter

FIFTEEN

I DON’T LOOK at Mom’s documents the next day or the day after that. I decide I don’t want to know any more about Oma and Grandpa Sam in the old days—I want to know only about my dad.

So I resume my Internet search. I’m busy Googling when Oma and Marie come in from outside, where they were planting some flower bulbs that will come up in the spring, even though we won’t be here. I pause to make tea for them both while they scrub the dirt from their hands. Chamomile for Marie—who has a tension headache because Al still won’t take his hernia to the doctor, even though he’s complaining almost nonstop now—and green tea, a natural energy booster, for Oma, who says she’s pooped out from all the work she’s done since we got here.

“I told Al I’d give him more Reiki. I wish he’d come by,” Oma says.

“Oh, that stubborn old coot,” Marie says. “I’m ready to give him another hernia, or worse, if he doesn’t stop all his bellyaching and just go in.”

It’s what Marie calls Indian summer, so they take their teacups with them when they go outside so Oma can smoke. I know they’ll be out there for a while, sitting on the two old chairs Oma dragged from the shed, and I settle in to do my homework, which, for some reason, I don’t mind doing today.

An hour later, Marie comes in to get her purse because she has to leave. She gives me and Milo each one of her bear hugs, and I go back to my schoolwork.

I’m reading but can feel Oma staring at me. When I look up at her, she comes to the table and sits down beside me. “Lucy?” she says. “Peter called when you were riding bikes with Milo earlier.”

“He did? Oh, I wish I had gotten to talk to him!” I expect Oma to acknowledge my disappointment with an empathetic smile, but instead, her smile looks only happy.

“He’s going up to Bayfield for his cousin’s wedding next weekend. His whole family is flying in, so he’s taken some time off, and, if it’s okay with your mom, he wants to stop here on Thursday.”

I suddenly get so excited I can hardly sit still. “That’s just three days away!”

“Peter’s coming?” Milo asks as he enters the kitchen to bring his cookie plate to the sink.

“If your mother says it’s okay,” Oma repeats.

“Why wouldn’t she say yes?” Milo says with a blink. I roll my eyes. He’s so oblivious!

“I sent your mom to the pharmacy. She should be back in about twenty minutes—if she doesn’t stop at Mitzy’s. But please, children. Let me be the one to bring this up. She’ll need to be eased into this delicately.”

“Okay,” I say. Then, while Oma sits down to read from her Tibetan Book of the Dead, I sit and think about Peter’s visit. And of how, if he and Mom were still together, I’d be going to Bayfield too

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