Life Without You by Liesel Schmidt Read Free Book Online

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