I hadn’t been to the lake in three years. My grandfather left us unexpectedly, less than two weeks after he had quit his sixty-year smoking habit. After a full day’s wake and a dewy morning funeral, we gathered on Larry’s deck. It was a humid August afternoon, and the air was thick with liquored breath and cigarette smoke.

If I stood at the very edge of the driveway, I could see the lake at the end of the road. It looked just like it did in Grandpa’s old paintings. A murky aquamarine, bordered in tall pines, their trunks the color of the wood that framed the dusty watercolor hanging on the inside door of Larry’s shop. In the summertime, we doggie-paddled from the dime sized sandy beach out to the dock that floated in the farthest corner of the lake. As a little girl, I would squish my bare feet into the algaed bottom as far out as I could go, pushing my chin up towards the clouds, until my nose dipped under water and I had to pick my feet up and swim. As I got older, I spent less and less time shuffling my feet across the lake’s floor. By the time I was eleven, I’d stopped going in at all. The older I became, the more afraid I felt of what hid beneath the surface.

I paced in circles around the swollen deck, in and out of the house. On one of my loops through Larry’s den, I started to collect stray scraps of paper: unpaid bills, abandoned grocery lists, liquor store receipts. I walked out to the deck, and took my seat at the sticky head of the ash covered table.

 I kicked off my shoes and squished my feet into the wood beneath them, pretending it was the lake floor, and began to fold paper cranes.

 For the first time in a week, Larry stopped moving. He set down his beer, put out his cigarette. “Fia, what’re you doing?” He reached for the paper bird too roughly, as he did everything. Even Snapper, the all black stray who adopted Larry, bobbed beneath his hand when he pet her.

Snapper had lost the top of her left ear in a midnight tussle with a possum, Larry was missing a third of most of his fingers. She brought him furred and feathered trophies. He shared whatever he had scrounged for dinner: my grandmother’s spaghetti, KFC chicken, Chinese shrimps with lobster sauce. He always served Snapper first. 

He turned the fragile crane over in his hand, examining it with a focus I’d only seen him use in the Harley Davidson shop we went to when he visited California. Screech dragged the chair beside me, “teach me,” a softness to his voice I had never heard.

My visits to the lake were always a time to learn new things. One summer, Larry taught my brother and I to fish and accidentally sent a hook through the far edge of his palm. One spring, after a late-night swim and a bowl of cereal and expired milk, he taught me to play poker, emptying a new box of cigarettes for us to bet with. The winter that I turned eleven, he decided that I was ready to learn to shoot a gun and set out a target with his cellphone at its bullseye. Another year, it was a knife fight, an ATV ride, and on one peculiar fall dawn, a standoff with a mountain turkey.

That afternoon on the deck, I became the teacher. It was the first time I ever felt grown up.

When my mother emerged from the house later that afternoon, she paused at the deck’s edge and looked around. The dirt driveway was piled with red and black Harleys, the air heavy with smoke, but the table was full. Around it sat bikers and carpenters, men whose hands and voices were rough. They gently folded pieces of paper into cranes, telling stories of Grandpa, an unexpected softness in their delicate work.

***

My mother packed her life into the trunk of her car and moved to California when she was only seventeen. Her relationship with my grandfather, already cracked from outdated ideals and years of a rebellious youth, never had the chance to mend as she grew. Although I only knew him as the man who grew roses, gifted watercolor sets, built birdhouses, and sang in a deep Italian vibrato, I know that my mother’s childhood was not so wholesome. She spent much of her life angry, but never could tell him.

Larry and my grandfather were inseparable. He taught Larry his trade, carpentry, and the pair worked side by side for most of their lives. Larry had his first drink beneath the yellow slide on his elementary school playground. My grandfather refused to see how far Larry had fallen into his bottle. This further complicated his relationship with my mother. When my grandfather died, the hole he left only drove my mother and Larry further apart. Her voice grew sharp on our trips to the lake.

I spent many years angry with my uncle, though I wonder now what was inherited, and what was my own. We stopped going to the lake less than a year after my grandfather passed, when Larry sold my grandmother’s wedding rings to pay his electricity bill. Nearly five years later, after he had been missing for several months, police found Larry in a New York City alley, frostbitten with no pulse. It took them fifty minutes to revive him, and two weeks until he came out of his alcohol induced psychosis and could tell them who he was.

 He battled liver failure for many years after this, and then, in 2017, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. He spent this moment in his usual nonchalance, “stage four ain’t so bad, right Doc?” 

“Well, there is no stage five.” 

Larry danced with Death all his life. He lived on borrowed time. He survived on will and an impenetrable stubbornness. When Death finally took him, she hesitated. 

He called my mother from the hospital on Tuesday morning and told her that he only had three days left to live. My mother arrived on Thursday morning, and on Friday morning, her brother died.

***

My mother and I are sitting in the corner booth of our favorite margarita bar when she utters his name for the first time since his death. “He was my baby brother” she repeats, at first in a full voice, and then softer and softer, until only her lips move but no sound escapes them. She takes another sip from her frosted glass, and then, she tells me this story. It is the first time that I have ever heard her speak about her brother without a tension in her voice.

Lori was Larry’s first love. And he was hers. People stopped them in the streets, family planned nuptials. But he was already a decade old addict. During one of their breaks, Larry told my mother that he had slept with Lori’s best friend, Mary McGuee. The couple got back together, and years later, traveled to California to visit my mother. After a long night of drinking, thinking that she already knew, my mother mentioned Mary McGuee to Lori.

When my mother went to collect Larry’s things from the hospital, she found an unfinished letter he had written the night before he died. The top half of the crinkled notebook page is scrawled with three different introductions, each with a wobbly line drawn through. Eight and a half fingers, a failing liver, blackened lungs, and this.

Dear Lori Sue,

It’s me, Larry Comito. I bet this isn’t the person you expected to hear from a hundred years after we broke up. I saw that idiot Sal a long while back, he said you were living well on Saddle Island. I’m so happy for you. I’m writing because in December 2017, I was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. It blew me away. You were the one I should have married, but I took you for granted with my drinking and lousy habits. I want you to know that I never slept with Mary McGuee, I only told my sister that because at the time, I didn’t want anyone to know that I was still in love with you. I think we fit like a glove in every way. Loving you was always #1 on my list. By the time you…

On the morning Larry died, the nurse said he was already traveling. “My sister is right here with me, I can feel her holding my hand,” Larry muttered, though my mother was still asleep across town. I like to think of him traveling. I hope that my grandfather was there to meet him, and that the other side is warm.

When spring comes, we will row boats out to float in the deepest blue of the lake and spread Larry’s ashes. It is the same place where he laid Snapper to rest almost five years ago. On that day, I hope to fold my mother’s forgiveness, my grandfather’s love, and my fondest memories into a paper crane, and let them float away to him.

————————————————————

Sofia Grady is a 2020 graduate of American University. Currently located in Southern California, Sofia draws themes from her background in anthropology to tell the stories of her and her loved ones. She is fluent in American Sign Language, and spent three years working as a photographer. When Sofia is not writing, she enjoys travel, yoga, and long walks on the beach.

Art:
Tears Gathering Moonlight
Digital Collage
Bill Wolak