The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

It should’ve been sad, this little sun-cured widow with hair like white wool rambling around her house and tending her gardens alone, having just lost her neighbor and friend — a fixture in her life that had been there half a century, one of the last remaining pillars of her past now gone.

It should’ve been sad, but wasn’t. Her eyes were too bright, too expectant, and it made me feel better than I had since I’d gotten the news days ago. This was what Grandma Evvie was like, right up to the end. How do you justify mourning a thing like that? It should’ve been celebrated.

But no, she’d gotten the usual dirge-like send-off, and I was tempted to think she would’ve hated it.

“So you’ve come to sort out the house?” Mrs. Tepovich said.

“Only before our parents do the real job,” Gina told her. “They said if there was anything of Grandma’s that we wanted, now would be the time to pick it out.”

“So we’re here for a long weekend,” I said.

“Just you two? None of the others?”

More cousins, she meant. All together, we numbered nine. Ten once, but now nine, and no, none of the others would be coming, although my cousin Lindsay hadn’t been shy about asking me to send her a cell phone video of a walkthrough, so she could see if there was anything she wanted. I was already planning on telling her sorry, I couldn’t get a signal up here.

“Well, you were her favorites, you know.” Mrs. Tepovich got still, her eyes, mired in a mass of crinkles, going far away. “And Shae,” she added softly. “Shae should’ve been here. She wouldn’t have missed it.”

Gina and I nodded. She was right on both counts. There were a lot of places my sister should’ve been over the past eight years, instead of… wherever. Shae should’ve been a lot of places, been a lot of things, instead of a riddle and a wound that had never quite healed.

“We were wondering,” Gina went on, “if there was anything from over there that you would like.”

“Some of that winter squash from her garden would be nice, if it’s ready to pick. She always did grow the best Delicata. And you’ve got to eat that up quick, because it doesn’t keep as long as the other kinds.”

We were looking at each other on two different wavelengths.

“Well, it doesn’t,” she said. “The skin’s too thin.”

“Of course you’re welcome to anything from the garden that you want,” Gina said. “But that’s not exactly what we meant. We thought you might like to have something from inside the house.”

“Like her chair,” I said, pretending to be helpful. “Would you want her chair?”

Had Mrs. Tepovich bitten into the tartest lemon ever grown, she still wouldn’t have made a more sour face. “That old eyesore? What would I need with that?” She gave her head a stern shake. “No. Take that thing out back and burn it, is what you should do. I’ve got eyesores of my own, I don’t need to take on anyone else’s.”

We stayed awhile longer, and it was hard to leave. Harder for us than for her. She was fine with our going, unlike so many people her age I’d been around, who did everything but grab your ankle to keep you a few more minutes. I guessed that’s the way it was in a place where there was always something more that needed to be done.

Just this, on our way out the door:

“I don’t know if you’ve got anything else planned for while you’re here,” she said, and seemed to be directing this at me, “but don’t you go poking your noses anywhere much off the roads. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around.”

Evening came on differently out here than it did at home, seeming to rise up from the ground and spill from the woods and overflow the ditches that ran alongside the road. I’d forgotten this. Forgotten, too, how night seemed to spread outward from the chicken coop, and creep from behind the barn, and pool in the hog wallow and gather inside the low, tin-roofed shack that had sheltered the pigs and, miraculously, was still standing after years of disuse. Night was always present here, it seemed. It just hid for a while and then slipped its leash again.

I never remembered a time when it hadn’t felt better being next to somebody when night came on. We watched it from the porch, plates in our laps as we ate a supper thrown together from garden pickings and surviving leftovers from the fridge.

When she got to it, finally, Gina started in gently. “What Mrs. Tepovich said… about having anything else planned this weekend… meaning Shae, she couldn’t have been talking about anything else… she wasn’t onto something there, was she? That’s not on your mind, is it, Dylan?”

“I can’t come up here and not have it on my mind,” I said. “But doing something, no. What’s there to do that wouldn’t be one kind of mistake or another?”