Life Without You - Liesel Schmidt

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that nothing had changed within the safe little realm of my grandparents’ home. That while we were getting older and everything else was different, there were certain things that were still sacred. So there, in Grammie’s mirrored medicine cabinet, was a thick balm of reassurance. It gave me endless pleasure to unscrew the lid and breathe in its familiar scent, a scent I smelled nowhere else but at my grandmother’s house, the scent of maturity and skin that was being pampered by a deeper clean than my own little face was used to getting. The smell of being a Big Girl, all grown up.

      Depending on the time of day, there might be a set of partials soaking in a glass by the sink, the bright pink of artificial gums looking almost lurid as they waited for their next wearing. Multiple tubes of lipstick were always scattered in various locations—some on the faux marble counter to the left-hand side of the sink; some in the little medicine cabinet, on the shelves next to the Gold Bond powder. Again, those were the simpler days, before they branched out and explored all kinds of different formulations of their stock product. Gold Bond was Gold Bond, and it came in a harvest gold plastic canister with a red sifter top.

      But back to the lipsticks. They were all invariably Revlon or Cover Girl or Avon, but all of them bore close resemblance to one another in shade—a mauvy rose shade that seemed to get pinker and pinker as time wore on and she got older. Grammie wore Cover Girl blush and pressed powder—another one of those smells that, for some reason, made a heady, heavy imprint on my brain. Lever 2000 or Tone were her soaps of choice, resting in the soap dish tile above the sink, settling with authority into a little suction-cupped soap-saver mat. Sometimes she had Pert Plus shampoo on the ledge of the fiberglass tub-and-shower combo, sometimes it was Pantene. And more often than not, there were foil packets of Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment somewhere in that medicine cabinet, buried amidst all the other clutter along the white plastic shelves of its interior.

      These were some of the sights and smells of Grammie’s bathroom, that special lair of lady-dom where us girls prepared every morning for the day and every evening for bed. This was the one with a high, handicapped toilet rather than the standard bowl, where you could peek out the shoulder-height window to see who was on the deck, who might be ringing the bell at the back door or was thomping away after letting the old screen door slam shut behind them. These were the sights and smells that were decidedly absent for me, as I stood staring and studying from the doorway. They made me feel her loss even more acutely, those personal little things that were no longer there.

      Would the shock have been less if they’d still been there, unused and collecting the dust of time and neglect? I shook my head and tried to blink back the tears that I felt burning my eyes, my nose, my throat. She wasn’t coming back. I would never get to bury my head in the warm pillowy softness of her frame. She had always disparagingly called herself fat—but she wasn’t fat. She was Grammie, and grammies were supposed to be warm and powdery and soft. She was fluffy. She represented the safety of innocence and youth and fun summers of being carefree.

      I looked around at the hollowness of the bathroom.

      What was this place going to be like, now that she was no longer here?

      I sighed, and it seemed to echo in the small room. I would have almost a month to find out.

      Today was day one of my trip.

      Today was day one of the Break from Routine listing on my bucket list.

      Today was the beginning of my goal to Reconnect With Family, people like my grandfather, as well as the cousins and uncles and aunts who were part of the thread of my extended family—people I’d lost touch with somewhere along the way as my world shrank to be smaller and smaller.

      Today was Day One, and I had a lot of work to do.

      “Hey, Dellie,” Grandpa said half an hour later, looking up from the paper. He was ensconced in his recliner in the den, his pale bare feet propped up on the footrest, the lamp next to him casting a dim glow of light in the brown-ness of the den.

      It was, undeniably, a very brown room. Brown plush carpeting, brown paneling on the walls, brown furniture. Brown, brown, brown. But it had always been that way, in various shades of the same hue, different forms and fabrics coming and going through the years, but always brown. It was a fact that was immutable, and one that comforted me beyond words.

      “Hi,” I said, smiling at the familiar sight of him there, in that chair, paper in hand. “What are you watching?”

      “The news for now. It should be over in a few minutes, though. Was there something you wanted to watch?” he asked, peering at me from behind the lenses of his glasses.

      I shook my head silently, casting a quick glance at the television screen as I shuffled toward the blue recliner that bore pride of place in the room, on the other side of the coffee table from his own chair. It was Grammie’s chair. The more comfy chair, the one that all of us grandchildren made a beeline for. The one that held her scent and bore her imprint.

      “This is WAVY TV 10,” said a voice as the newscasters reappeared on the screen.

      “No. Nothing I want to watch. Just came to see what you were doing and if you wanted some company,” I murmured.

      “I always want your company,” he boomed back at me with a smile. “You’s my gal.”

      It was a familiar phrase from him, a simple string of words that I couldn’t hear enough. And now, they seemed to mean even more.

      “Good.” My smile back wavered as I noticed how the walls almost echoed with absence.

      “So, big things going on in the world?” I asked. Not that I really cared all that much what the news anchors were droning on about, but it seemed an appropriate thing to say at the moment.

      “Government’s still the government,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “The race was good, though. My driver won.” His grin widened.

      “Yay.”

      “Too bad I’m not a betting man; I might have made some money,” he said.

      I arched an eyebrow and smiled. “Right, but betting would’ve sucked all the fun out of it for you. I’m glad you’re not the betting type.”

      “Why’s that?” he asked.

      I shrugged. Something about the idea of my grandfather placing a bet, even if it was just among some of his friends, seemed vaguely unsettling. It seemed dishonest, somehow, and out of character for him. I would’ve had to readjust who I knew him to be. Hardworking, salt-of-the-earth, outspoken.

      “Well, no worries. Betting’s for idiots,” he said simply.

      “And you’re no idiot,” I returned, keeping my face as sober as possible, even though I felt a smile creeping its way in. Some things never changed, and those were things that were reassuring beyond expression.

      “Nope. I’ll tell you who is, though,” he said, the wrinkles of his wizened face shifting as his expression became one of wide-eyed incredulity. “Walt. Old fart,” he panned, not even waiting for me to guess.

      I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “Walt bet on the race?” I squeaked.

      “Not on this race, maybe,” Grandpa said, shaking his head as he spoke. “He and Harry have started betting on them, though; and last week those two fools lost their shirts in a bet they had going with two of the boys down at the church.”

      “Say what?” I knew I sounded stupefied, but truth be told, I was. There was really no other word for it.

      Especially knowing Walt. And Harry. The two brothers had been in my grandparents’ circle of friends for more than fifty years, so I had no memories of a summer passing without them in it. In fact, for as long as I could remember, I’d always called them Uncle Walt and Uncle Harry. I’d gone through much of my childhood thinking they must have been blood relatives.

      Silly, perhaps, since the two men were light-skinned African-Americans, but with a family tree as odd as mine, you never

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