The grandfather clock on the mantle begins its deep, vibrating announcement of the hour as Ruby’s father sits in his truck outside Grandma’s house. He’s come to pick Ruby up, but he refuses to come inside. Grandma refuses to let her go outside. He leans on the horn, but Grandma’s fingers—strong from decades of kneading bread and hanging laundry on the line—dig as deep into Ruby’s shoulder as Ruby’s own do into the handle of her overnight bag.
Grandma’s hands fed and clothed five children by taking in laundry for the neighbors while Ruby’s grandfather drank away his paychecks. Ruby’s father, quite the little shit in his younger days—confirmed by both Grandma and her father—knew his mother’s hands as stone just as often as they were velvet. Ruby is old enough to know love can be both hard and soft. The pinch in her shoulder is the protective growl of a mama grizzly. She leans back into the solid form of her grandmother. Grandma wraps her other arm across Ruby’s chest, further enveloping her in her bubble.
Through the curtain, they see Ruby’s father climb out of his red pick-up. He stands on the sidewalk in front of Grandma’s house. The days her father won’t come into the house are the ones when his breath smells like the miniature bottles of Wild Turkey stashed in the front flap of the truck’s seat cover. Ruby knows these bottles well. They’ve littered their lives as far back as she can remember.
Grandma has told Ruby how she prayed over her children, willing that none would catch their father’s drinking disease, be infected with the insatiable thirst. Ruby’s father heard these prayers. Her father has the power to stride in and claim Ruby. She’s his, after all. But that would mean looking his mother in the eye, the price he has to pay for his daughter. He must drink his mother’s disappointment in a pot of strongly brewed black coffee. He must gather the cumbrous pieces of his mother’s broken heart and carry them away sober if he wants to take Ruby home.
Ruby is suspended between them, the taste of Grandma’s homemade blueberry pancakes still on her lips. She is torn between hope and history. Hope insists that coming in to meet his mother’s gaze might be enough this time. Might remind him of promises made. Promises broken. That this time will be different. History reminds Ruby that her father only ever travels in circles.
The last strike of the clock leaves its hum lingering in the air, and Ruby watches the minutes tick by one excruciating degree after another. Ruby thinks about how Grandma has to wind the grandfather clock with an old key or it will stop ticking. She wonders if God forgets to wind the world some days. She wonders if today is one of those days.
–
Diane D. Gillette’s work has appeared in various venues, including the Saturday Evening Post, Blackbird, and Middle House Review. Her work is a Best Small Fictions selection. She lives in Chicago and is a founding member of the Chicago Literary Writers.