32.

The Mapeses and Grandma Pencil took an Amtrak to Kalamazoo in the summer of 1988. It was a sixty-eight minute ride for a three-day weekend. Not exactly an ocean liner to Australia, but to the kids, it was like going to the moon. They’d never left Grand Rapids (except for a few of Toby’s football games in neighboring Rockford).

Each year, Murray depleted his week of vacation time. But he spent it you-know-where (underground), cranking out you-know-whats (inventions) for you-know-who (nobody). In fact, the Mape-ses had only gone out as a family—as in, “Mom, Dad, Toby, McKenna, and Audrey leave the house together, pile into one car and drive to the same destination”—some two dozen times during the years of 1972—1988.

The Kalamazoo vacation was Grandma Pencil’s idea. She insisted. She made all the arrangements. It was her birthplace, the city where she’d lived her happiest days until being taken to the Philippines. Her father was buried in Kalamazoo’s largest cemetery, a place called Mountain Home. She hadn’t “visited” him in over a decade. Although she admitted to remembering nothing of her time in Kalamazoo, the city occupied a special place in her persistent little heart.

Grandma Pencil was not a driver. She never owned a license. In general, she didn’t trust machines, and she especially hated cars. It’s reasonable to assume that one of her main automobile memories was of riding behind the hearse that carried her father’s corpse.

The Mapeses deboarded the Amtrak train on a muggy, overcast July afternoon. Murray’s forehead was beaded with sweat, and his Polo knockoff had black armpits. He carried Audrey down the steps, followed closely by Grandma Pencil, McKenna, Misty, and Toby. An observer—of which there were none (save for the shoeless lunatic reposing beside a newspaper box and staring out of two rheumy eyes, perhaps struggling internally against the realization that he’d slept through yet another opportunity to hurl himself in front of a train)—would have thought the Mapes clan was from another country, if not another planet, the way they tentatively descended the steps and clumsily arranged themselves on the platform, eyes wide with wonder and trepidation.

They found a taxicab idling in front of the station. They piled inside. Grandma Pencil sat shotgun. Murray and Misty book-ended the children in the back. Audrey’s crutches lay across their laps like the protective bar of a roller coaster. The cabbie didn’t comment on the unusual suitcase and suitcase accessory he’d been asked to put in the trunk.

It was a tight squeeze for the Mapeses. They were crammed in not so much like sardines as like teeth in an overcrowded mouth, leaning upon one other in a crooked jumble. Toby expressed irritation in his way, mumbles and growls, and before the cab had even exited the lot, he’d lifted Audrey onto his lap. This seemed to satisfy him, and Audrey did not resist.

The first stop the family made—before food, drink, or toilet—was Mountain Home Cemetery. The taxi climbed the winding, narrow roadway as Grandma Pencil squinted out the passenger window. The cab was air conditioned, but humidity filled the cramped space. Murray’s B.O. was not charming to anyone, least of all the driver, who stopped the car abruptly before Grandma had located her father’s plot. The cabbie apologized as he opened the trunk, saying he had to hurry back to the station for more passengers. No one argued with him; they took him at his word. Even though they were from a city twice the size of Kalamazoo, they might as well have been country bumpkins. Their immediate surroundings were unfamiliar, and therefore they assumed everything else in this Bizarro World was operating under a mysterious set of rules they had yet to decipher.

The cemetery was immense. Twenty-eight acres rolling to the horizon in all directions, white and gray markers dotting the green hills. Some gravestones were no wider or thicker than a 3-subject notebook, stained an ashen hue. Names and dates had faded into ghostly suggestions, as if despite mankind’s best efforts, nature was determined to purge the last traces of these people from the Earth. Other markers were monoliths, epic in their construction, a wonder and a horror to behold: Columns looming two stories high; rectangular blocks the size of automobiles; a monstrous sphere of reflective marble ten feet in diameter, balanced atop a pedestal. These two-ton raised middle fingers to Time, Nature, Impermanence, Rot—to Mortality itself—represented dead people who dared God to just try to erase them: HENRY UPJOHN, CHARLES B. HAYS, EPAPHRODITUS RANSOM.

The band of merry Mapeses puttered among the tombstones, admiring and critiquing in the oppressive heat. They laughed at names like Constance Noring and Paige Turner. They fell silent at the grave of little Louis Merchant 1889—1892 .

Toby unceremoniously whipped out his thingy and began hosing the base of Earl Coleman 1922—1980 ’s rather average-sized granite cross.

“Classy,” said Murray.

“You gotta go, you gotta go,” Toby answered.

“We all have to go,” Audrey said, and on her crutches she began beating an impressive path up the grassy slope. “Come on!” she hollered, and Misty followed.

McKenna was in “sled dog” mode. She’d lost the paper-scissors-rock competition with Toby and was therefore hitched, via shoulder and torso harness, to the cart on skis that Murray had invented the year before as a way to transport luggage.

At this time, wheeled suitcases were not yet standard. When luggage did have wheels, it was often difficult to pull without tipping. The sled was a cool idea—a rack mounted on two ski blades, upon which a piece (or pieces) of luggage could be strapped. But then some joker invented extendable handles and stuck the wheels on the vertical end of the suitcase. “Roller Boards,” they’re called now. Everyone’s got one. Murray saw another opportunity slip away.

Truthfully, though, he never gave it much thought. He was just happy to have made the SledDogger, an idea that had come to him one year earlier, when Grandma Pencil first mentioned the upcoming anniversary.

“Next summer will be thirty-three years since my father’s death,” she said. “The family must make a pilgrimage.”

“Make a pilgrim itch ?” Toby asked. “Why?” The family was eating dinner, and Toby was on his second helping.

“I want to be a pilgrim,” Audrey chimed in.

“It’s forty-seven years, Mom,” Misty said. She sounded embarrassed.

But Grandma Pencil couldn’t be bothered by mathematical trivialities. “Thirty-three was the age of our Lord Jesus when they nailed him to that tree.”

Sister P.V. and Sister Robert Ann joined Grandma in crossing themselves.

“More importantly,” Grandma continued, “thirty-three was Jesus’ age when he rose to join his Heavenly Father at the throne.”

Murray, brow furrowed, made calculations. “So,” he said, “if Jesus was thirty-three, then God was what, in his early sixties?”

Audrey giggled. The nuns frowned—not at Murray, but at Audrey. No doubt every one of their withered hands itched to give her a thumping. No doubt they were all imagining the perverse joy of laying her over their knees. Grandma muttered under her breath, most of it inaudible. The phrase “devil child,” however, was quite clear.

McKenna’s face burned with anger, burned as much as her throat. She told Grandma Pencil to shut up. She was sent to her room without finishing supper. Little did anyone know, she would savor her lasagna for the next half-hour.

Misty knocked on the door. McKenna lay on her bed. Misty took a seat in the desk chair and scooted it across the carpet, to the bedside. McKenna closed her eyes as the scent of Misty’s perfume filled her nose.

“Grandma Pencil hasn’t had a happy life,” Misty said.

“So no one else can have one, either?” McKenna’s voice came out as a rasp.

“Darling, have you been feeling well?”

“So now it’s my fault.”

“You don’t eat. You’re very thin.”

“I know. I need to be like Toby Dick, the great white whale. He’s super cool, and I’m a loser.”

Her mother’s voice—McKenna wanted to lay here forever with her eyes closed, listening, letting Misty’s words brush her, baste her, tenderize her. Arguing with Mom was the last thing Mc-Kenna wanted to do, but she needed to hear Mom’s voice, so she hurled stones. Misty was a pond; her surface would suffer only the slightest ripple before returning to its smooth, natural state.

“Grandma loves all of us,” Misty said. “Even Audrey. I know it’s hard to see, but it’s true. Sometimes what shows on the outside is the opposite of what’s inside. When people act angry, they’re usually hurting. Sad and hurting.”

“Those are your specialties.”

Got her with that stone. Misty stood without a sound and left the room. So she was human after all. And McKenna wished she could take it back.

Nothing is taken back. Nothing is erased. It piles up. Walls us in.

McKenna dragged the SledDogger (Patent no. 40457A) up the hill, trailing fifteen yards behind her father. They arrived at a thicket of trees at the edge of the cemetery. Murray unzipped and began shooting a heavy stream into the dirt. McKenna, embarrassed, unsnapped the harness (it was easy, the “push of a button,” exactly as Murray had boasted during the demonstration). Where had Misty and Audrey gone to pee? McKenna had to go, too. Her hips ached. Salty sweat flavored her upper lip.

With a determined puff of air, like a dragon, she yanked down her jeans and pan ties and squatted. The splashing increased, deepened in resonance, as a puddle formed beneath her. She decided she wouldn’t be embarrassed. She didn’t care that she wasn’t with the girls.

“You got your dad’s bladder,” Murray said. They’d been going for over twenty seconds, neither showing signs of slowing.

“I guess.”

“You WHAT?” The hearing loss had begun.

“I GUESS.”

“I could’ve sworn you said, ‘I’m blessed.’ ”

“You guys pee forever,” Audrey said.

She’d materialized from behind a marble block marked ASHTON 1922—1977.

“What do you think of Kalamazoo so far, honey?” Murray said. He was trickling now, as was McKenna.

“The people aren’t very talkative.”

Murray laughed. “And their name tags are waaayy oversized.”

McKenna, Murray, and Audrey rejoined Misty and Toby, and they fanned out like a search party to track down Grandma Pencil. They found her kneeling on a patch of grass. There was no standing grave marker in front of her—only a rectangular bronze plaque laid into the ground.

Her eyes were closed. Her lips formed words. Following Murray’s lead, the family stopped a few yards away. Nobody spoke. The air was pasty. Above, the clouds hung like clumps of dark berries, ready to burst. Grandma Pencil’s lean torso swayed in the breeze. In her dress and velvet millinery hat, she resembled a flower, a black-stemmed flower crying for its daddy.