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What We Inherit  
by Carrie Guimond

​I woke in a panic, not knowing where I was. Looking around the living room that was still foreign to me, I realized that I must have fallen asleep on the brown leather couch. Directly in front of me, dim light poured in through a large bay window. Dawn or dusk? My head steadily began to throb from a lack of caffeine. It was morning.

    I tried to remember yesterday's events, but the jetlag left me feeling as if I was in a drunken stupor. I'd brought nothing but a few days’ worth of clothes and toiletries. I wasn't staying long, just long enough to figure out what to do next.

    I made my way to the kitchen. My bare feet braced against the cool white tile in the hallway. My grandmother's house was the antithesis of my cluttered studio in Tucson. Everything smelled and looked new. The house had to be fifty years old, and yet there were no walking paths on the cream-colored carpet, no dust on the end tables. 

    The neon green numbers on the stovetop confirmed that it was morning. I dug through my grandmother's cabinets—well, my cabinets—searching for coffee, frustrated at the absence of routine. Pushing aside Ball Jars of preserved peaches and green beans, I found a large plastic tub of Folgers.

    I struggled with the coffee maker. It was one of those automatic drips with an eight-cup glass carafe. Did people still really use these? As the coffee pot hissed and trickled, I glanced around the room. A worn Bible rested on the dining room table. Wondering if it was for appearances, I opened it slightly. The pages were free of pen marks and highlights, but that was to be expected in a home like this. 

    Searching through the fridge, I found a small carton of milk. I sniffed it lightly. Sour. It expired a week ago. She must have been planning a grocery trip. I tasted the black coffee and winced, missing my French press. I wouldn't be here long. 

    The house was cold. I cupped the mug of steaming coffee—Campbell's Feed Store, it read—as I passed back through the hallway. Faded family photos caught my eye. In one, there were two red-headed boys in corduroy suits. They posed with their arms across each other's shoulders. Brothers. About eleven or twelve. Behind them was a church which I had seen as I drove into town. Down the hallway was another shot of them together, but they were older in this one. They wore blue jeans and white t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. One stood in the bed of a truck with his arms outstretched; the other lifted a bale of hay. There were no photos of me, but of course, why would there be?

    Back in the living room, the light had grown brighter. I went over to my purse and pulled out the white envelope that I'd carried across the country. It had been delivered to me express with no return address. It was simple, perhaps too simple. The single typed page explained that my grandmother had passed and that the house was mine. A small, bronze key had fallen out as I unfolded it for the first time. Behind the letter was the deed and an old, stained survey. Eighty acres. What was I to do with eighty acres? The last two sentences of the letter bothered me more than anything. Set in their own paragraph, they read: She wasn't a writer like you, but she enjoyed reading. You'll find quite a collection upstairs. The letter was unsigned.

    I drifted toward the bay window, rereading the last paragraph over and over again. The sun had risen enough for me to see the foggy landscape. On one side of the long dirt drive was the house surrounded by shortleaf pine trees, and a garden of daylilies and crepe myrtles. On the other, a pasture of rolling green hills lined with a rustic wooden fence. It was then, through the morning fog, that I saw the boy.

    He didn't see me, though. He was headed—rather confidently—toward the woods to the left of the house. Had he been a few years older, I would have suspected he was sneaking off to meet a girl. But he was too young. Maybe eleven. I noticed a backpack on his thin shoulders. Wasn't it Saturday? His lanky arms swung idly at his sides, then he raised them to fiddle with the adjuster straps on his backpack. He knew exactly where he was going, exactly what he was doing. I'd never owned anything substantial before, let alone property. If I was supposed to be bothered by a stranger walking across my pasture, I wasn't. I did, however, wonder if he was a stranger to my grandmother. Had she known this boy? Did he visit her grave?

    The boy disappeared into the woods. 

 

    I'd visited my grandmother's grave on the way into town. I realized that fresh graves don't look like the ones on TV. The mounded clay was a harsh sight against the neatly trimmed grass. There was no headstone yet. Too soon. But I knew it would read something like: Beloved Mother, Wife, and Friend.

    Grief. That's what I should have felt, not gratitude for missing the funeral. Grief was normal. I arranged the bouquet of yellow roses from the nearby Piggly Wiggly on the mound. That seemed like the right thing to do. I wanted to feel something, I really did. But I barely knew the woman. As her single bastard grandchild, the concept of "grandmother" was a myth to me. 

 

    I was stalling, and I knew it. The GPS in my rental car said that down the main street and then a long way into the country was her home—my home. What kind of person leaves their home to a stranger? I dreaded finding a token of myself as much as not finding one at all.

 

    The boy emerged from the tree line an hour later, and made his way back across the pasture. So much certainty in his gait. I'd never been that certain of anything in my life. I went back to the photos on the wall. Which one was he? My father. I searched the faces of the red-haired boys, looking for any part of my own face in either of theirs. They looked so alike, but neither enough like me. 

 

    As dusk approached, I sat on the wooden swing on the front porch. The cobblestone path that led to the front door was lined with stone toads and turtles—all of whom seemed to be wearing hats and glasses. A quick flicker of light above a monocled amphibian caught my eye. Fireflies. I'd only ever heard of them. I swung myself as the yellow lights danced. In the distance, a dog barked.

 

    There is a sort of desperation that manifests when you've not heard your own voice for days or weeks. I went to the church in the photo. I wanted to hear someone or have the opportunity to hear myself. But it was a mistake. The large sanctuary was nearly empty. White pews, people, even a white cross. I noticed little gold plaques on the end of the pews and figured I should sit in the one with my grandmother’s name or risk taking someone's seat. 

 

    I hadn't planned to go to a church, and knew I wasn't dressed for it. An older gentleman in plaid and suspenders must have seen me walk in because he kept turning his head to glance at me in the back pew. I struggled to focus on what was being said or what I wanted from being there in the first place. Instead, I thought about what little I knew about the Bible. It was what everyone knew: on the first day, God created light; on the second day, God created the sky. I wondered if this was when he started storing up rainwater for the Flood? Creating just to destroy. 

    Suddenly, the man was in front of me. People were getting up to leave. I'd been sitting for the service as they stood and swayed and sat back down again and again. I hadn't realized it was over.     

    "You speak English?" He asked.

    "I'm sorry, what?"

    "English. You speak it?"

    "Yes."

    "Listen here, I know everyone in this town. And I ain't ever seen you around before."

    "No, you haven't," I said as I stood to leave.

 

    In the days that followed, I watched the boy trek across the pasture every early morning. He always stayed in the woods for at least an hour. Once, he tossed a yellow tennis ball in the air as he walked. Another time, he carried a stack of blankets. I finally began to understand when he brought a giant smoked bone, the kind you get at the pet store wrapped in shrink-wrap. On that particular morning, I’d been sitting in the swing with my coffee. I looked toward the small opening in the trees where he always entered and saw a large dog with no discernable breed. Its head was low as it watched the boy, but its tail wagged happily. 

    The movement of the swing must have caught the boy’s eye, because for the first time he looked in my direction. I waved and smiled. The boy looked spooked. He took off into the woods. 

    I felt terrible for having scared him. I wanted to find him and tell him he wasn't in trouble for cutting across the pasture or taking care of the stray-looking dog, but I didn't know anything about him or where to find him. He'd developed like a painting in my mind. What I knew of him existed from one windowpane to the other.

    

    Eventually, I decided to go upstairs. I'd limited myself to the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom. A fear of finding any acknowledgment of myself in the house, or not finding it, had paralyzed me. But it was time to see what was up there. The letter-writer was right. One of the two bedrooms upstairs was a library. White lace curtains hung over the windows, causing webs of light to dance across the room. I ran my hand across the spines of the books and pulled one at random. When I opened it, a wallet-sized photograph fell out. The edges were round and withered. I knew the young woman in the picture had to be my grandmother. In the photographs downstairs, she was already a mother, but she couldn't have been more than eighteen in the photo I held. She wore a green and white sundress belted at her thin waist. Cat-eye sunglasses were pushed up on her head. And in her smile and eyes, there it was: my face in hers, even if the coloring was different. 

 

    The next morning, I woke to the sound of trees scraping the house. The sun should have been up, but the house was illuminated by only a soft green glow. There was a sort of electricity in the atmosphere. I rushed to the window just as the boy was entering the tree line.

    Then something happened. Only a few minutes passed before he came sprinting back across the pasture. Instinctively, I ran onto the porch. The air was heavy and muggy.  I wanted to call after him, but I didn’t know his name. Even if I did, he was too far to hear me. I went back inside. Something was wrong, and I didn’t know how to help him. 

    The muggy air turned into a storm of slanted rain. The green sky twisted. I knew I should get away from the window, but I needed to know if he was okay. I could only wait until he returned.

    And he did return. Looking like a shadow in the pouring rain, he tore across the pasture carrying a shovel. The storm wasn’t relenting. He couldn’t be out there. I left the house just as he re-entered the woods. The umbrella I brought with me was soon useless and I tossed it down. 

    I found the walking path into the woods. Tripping over rocks and roots, I realized I was unsure of what I would say to him or how I would explain my presence. 

    I didn’t have to say anything. It wasn’t long before I came upon him and the dog. It laid on the ground, unmoving. A jug of antifreeze was discarded nearby. He saw me and I blinked through the rain pouring down my face, trying to find any words.

    The boy looked at me unafraid and spoke first. His eyes blazed with fury. “Did you do this?”

    “No,” I replied. I desperately needed him to know I wasn’t a part of this. “No, I live in the house down the trail. I saw you running.”

    “I have to bury him. I can’t leave him out here.”

    “Let me help you…we can bury him together.”

    The boy handed me the shovel as hail began to fall. 

​

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