Morgan Christie
Beautiful Thang
“Come on, Gram,” you try to hurry her along without sounding like you’re hurrying her. “It’s a long ride.”
“Where we goin’ again?” she asks.
“Mount Mitchell,” you answer.
“That right, that right.”
“And Gram,” you say. “Happy Birthday.”
You help her into the front seat of your convertible as she grips her snuff tin and the two of you take off on her ninetieth birthday trip, the one you’ve been planning for a month. You don’t understand how someone could live so close to the Appalachian range their entire life and never see it. You don’t understand how in ninety years, no one took her to see it. You wanted it to be a weekend trip, but she doesn’t do well at night in strange places. You know this because she didn’t do well in your apartment over the holiday, because you had driven four hours each way to pick her up, and had to take her home a few days later.
“You want me to put the top down,” you ask her.
She doesn’t answer, just gives you the stink eye. You laugh, but she doesn’t.
“Slow down, baby. I don’ feel comfortable up here,” she says.
“Here where?” you ask, fully aware of what she’s talking about.
“In this seat,” she says. “I wanna get in the back.”
You motion behind you, “I don’t have a backseat, Gram.”
She spits some of her snuff before saying, “I just don’t like it up here.”
You look straight ahead, hands gripping the wheel, as she starts trying to remember why she doesn’t like sitting in the front seat. You look ahead because you can’t look at her, because you know why she doesn’t like it. You’re afraid if she looks directly at you something will spark and she’ll remember the time she told you about it, about the last time she rode in the front seat sixty years ago. She goes on like that for an hour; spitting, trying to remember, and telling you to slow down, you just grip and hope she doesn’t. You pull up to the parking lot closest to the peak before helping her out. You hold her arm as the two of you approach the lookout. You tell her how excited you are for her to see it.
“Where we at, again?” she asks.
“Mount Mitchell,” you answer.
“That right, that right.”
You get to the top and you both become quiet. Lost in the air. It doesn’t look real; it looks too perfect to be real.
“Well,” she finally says. “Ain’t that the most beautiful thang.”
You smile, and this time, so does she. You position her then take a few steps back, you make sure she is in at least one of the pictures with the range behind her; so she doesn’t think you’re joking, lying, or being plum evil when you tell her she was there later on. The two of you sit down and talk for hours, looking out at that beautiful thang. You ask her a lot of questions, she answers most but she isn’t sure how to answer a few of them. You start to feel guilty then, because you only really started getting to know your grandmother when she started forgetting herself. You look at the time and tell her you should be heading home. You hope she won’t start complaining about the front seat again, but you can understand why she would.
You think about what she told you when she could still remember it as you ease her into the vehicle. You think about your grandparents driving home from the grocery store and sirens forcing them to the side of the road. You close the passenger side door and think about the officer telling your grandfather to get out on some Carolina back road in the 50s. You think of your grandfather taking your grandmother’s hand and rubbing his thumb against hers, wanting to say ‘don’t worry, sugar’, but being too afraid to. You glance at your grandmother as you walk around the back of the car and think of your uncle and mother watching from the backseat. You think of your grandparents starring at each other through the windshield as your grandfather is being searched for reasons known but unsaid. Your hand touches the trunk as you think of the officer being unnecessarily rough, and your grandmother wincing as her husband’s face is forced onto the hood of the car. You think of her listening to the officers’ laugh as you glance at the radio.
You think about how silent they were while driving home, and how she cleaned the cut aside his face after putting the children to bed. You think about her lying in bed that night, starring at your sleeping grandfather and his scarred cheek. You think of her crying, quietly, because that was their life and it wasn’t worth waking him over. You think of your grandmother being unable to ride in the front seat of a car until today, because it reminds her, it always reminded her. You rev up the engine and think if anything good has come out of her disease; it’s that she no longer has to remember that.
“Where we goin’ again?” she asks after you’ve been on the road a while.
You look at her and see that she’s serious, “We already went, Gram, to Mount Mitchell – we’re going home now. Remember, the mountain.”
“I never seen any mountain in my life,” she says.
You look away for a second, before pulling out your camera and showing her the picture you didn’t think you’d have to pull out this early. She stares at it for a moment, and becomes quiet. You’re not sure if she is lost, or not.
“Well,” she finally says. “Ain’t that the most beautiful thang.”
You take her hand and rub your thumb against hers, “Yes, Grandma, it is.”
Morgan’s work has appeared in Hippocampus, Aethlon, Blackberry, Germ Magazine, Moko, as well as others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook ‘Variations on a Lobster’s Tale’ was the winner of the 2017 Alexander Posey Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from New Plains Review Press (2018). She recently completed her Masters in Creative Writing.