The Weekend at Grandma’s Brick Bungalow

The afghan

She was crying the kind of crying you can’t talk through, with her hands over her face at Grandma’s table.

With her hair pulled back and her shoulders shaking, she looked about nine years old.

Mom got up without a word. She went into the living room and came back with Grandma’s afghan off the back of the couch, and she wrapped it around my sister’s shoulders from behind and held on.

“There,” Mom said into Jessica’s hair, the way Grandma used to say it to all of us. “There, there. I’ve got you. Mother’s got you. I’ve got you, baby.”

I don’t know which mother she meant. Maybe both. Grandma used to wrap that same afghan around us when we came in from the snow, rubbing our arms through it and saying those same words.

Dad reached across the table and laid his big hand flat on Jessica’s arm, the one holding the afghan closed under her chin. He left it there a long time without saying anything.

I sat across from them and watched my mother hold my sister in my grandmother’s afghan, and I cried too.

Not because I’d won anything. Because I’d been angry for five days, and I couldn’t find any of it anymore.