My Sweet Annie

1

One breath, and I was ten years old again.

The house smelled like it always had, like brand new bars of white Dove soap, old books, warm blankets, paint, and dust. It was still and quiet and unbearably empty, but the scent was a presence all its own, taking me back to the drowsy days I had spent as a child in my grandmother's house.

The room blurred in my vision. I let my backpack slide off of my shoulder and dropped my purse and the one bag of groceries I had brought with me. I sucked in a breath, trying to swallow down my tears, and leaned back against the half-open front door, pushing it closed.

I just had to get my bearings.

It wasn't hard. The house was familiar down to the smallest details. I was standing on the same rag rug Granny had kept in her entryway ever since I could remember; I had a vague notion that she'd made it herself a long, long time ago. By the door was a coat tree hung with a couple of light jackets and a sun hat. Beneath it was the wooden shoe rack my grandfather had made, and on it were Gran's church shoes, her walking shoes, and the rubber boots she always used to wear in the garden. Next to them on the top rack, sitting on a wooden tray, was Gran's sturdy bucket of a purse, its strap tucked neatly inside. Straight ahead of me was the dining room, and past that, the door to the kitchen. To my right was the living room, crowded with house plants and furniture, so aggressively cozy that it passed into cluttered. The dark blue sofa, the old-fashioned television, the side tables, the knick knacks, the stacks of books—I was certain that things must have changed since the last time I'd been here, but I couldn't have pointed out any differences. In my eyes, it was the same as it had always been.

I left my things by the door and stepped into the dining room. There were photos on the wall, all familiar. Mom as a baby, wearing white lace. Mom two or three years old in her father's arms, the two of them petting a shaggy dog with a stick in its mouth. There was a photo of me and Tim as kids, gap-toothed and grinning, and another of us, a little older, at a park. The biggest picture, hung in the center of everything, had been taken outside of the Methodist church where my Great Uncle Royal had preached for most of his life. Tim and I stood on either side of our mother. We looked equally uncomfortable in our Sunday clothes, but Gran, there with the three of us in her flowery dress, shone with pride.

So...here I was.

I turned away from our family photos, looking over the dining table to the door on the other side of the room. Gran's bedroom door. It was closed.

I think that was the moment I realized how truly alone I was. I don't know if a part of me had expected something different, coming to the house my grandmother had lived in all her life only to find her conspicuously missing from it.

She died here.

We had known for years that my brother Tim and I would inherit Gran's house when she died, but neither of us had been prepared for what it meant to inherit a home at all, let alone one in Iowa, all the way across the country from where we lived in Virginia. There wasn't any real urgency to take care of things here. Gran owned the house outright. Her own parents had built it.

Yet taking care of Gran's things had seemed urgent to me—maybe because it gave me something to do, a next step, a plan of action. After we'd all flown up for the funeral, I had made my plans to come back pretty quickly. After just a few weeks, I was settling in with a few suitcases, exhausted from the three-day drive.

Being here meant that I could leave the apartment I had shared with Colson.

Taking a leave of absence from my dull call center job had been easy. I was replaceable.

Tim was relying on me to do the heavy lifting. He had some kind of a techy job and his wife was a nurse with a brutal schedule, and they had two kids. Tim didn't live a life that could be put on pause. Besides, he hadn't seemed comfortable here. When we had stopped by to choose something for Gran to wear for the funeral, he had hovered on the front porch, barely willing to step inside. When I'd asked him what was wrong, he had just shrugged and edged away to scowl thoughtfully out at the yard, his manly way of rebuffing my concern for his feelings.