ONE
Four days before the ostriches stopped laying eggs, Grandma Helen died in an accident that wasn’t really an accident. It was a Sunday, when almost everyone was in church, when the only other trucks on Route 66 were bigger than hers, their immense grilles roaring toward her, then escaping one after another, until a tomato trailer out of Sacramento proved too enticing.
She had nowhere to be, no appointment to keep, no need that would require a drive through the heat of the Mojave in July. She hadn’t called up the stairs to ask if I needed anything from town. The last thing I heard of her was the rasp of her keys as she scooped them from the counter, the bang of the screen door as she left. Then nothing until the phone rang hours later.
“Tallulah?” The deep voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “It’s Sheriff Morris. I hate to tell you this over the phone,” he said, “but I wanted you to hear it from me.” And I knew. Just like that. In my mind, I could see Grandma Helen’s thick hands urging her pickup over the double yellow lines of the narrow highway. I felt the perfect silence that filled the cab, the way time slowed down in the moments before everything exploded in twisted metal.
“You all right?”
The afternoon light drifted in through faded yellow curtains. The tawny tile of the kitchen countertops gleamed. “Yeah,” I said. “I mean . . . no. Thank you for calling.” I hung up. The walls of the small kitchen pressed in around me. My chest ached.
I pushed through the front door and sank onto the steps overlooking the rolling expanse of desert. The hot, dry air outside burned my throat and seared my lips. In the corral, the ostriches strolled past one another, their long, meaty legs unfolding with each graceful stride. Our old border collie, Henley, trotted by on his way to his favorite cool spot in the barn. The leaves of the walnut tree whispered in a faint, hot breeze. And still she was gone.
How strange that one phone call from a man I barely knew could all but erase my grandmother from my life. I half expected her to emerge from the barn, rubbing at the crease between her eyebrows with her knuckle and grumbling about mice in the food stores. But she didn’t.
The sun crept toward the violet crags of the San Gabriel Mountains in the west. The light tilted and shadows stretched. Eventually, my aunt Christine’s minivan came up the half mile of gravel that was our driveway and parked in the shade of the walnut tree.
Eight months pregnant, she slid down from the driver’s seat the way honey falls from a spoon. She gripped the frame of the van until she was steady on her feet, then turned to me with her arms wide. “Tallulah, sweetheart.” She wore a draping dress with pale pink flowers on it, the fabric stretched taut over her belly.
I let her envelop me in a hug. Tears rolled down my cheeks. She patted my back. “It’s okay,” she said, though we both knew it wasn’t.
She put her arm around my waist and marched me into the kitchen, where she filled the kettle with water. The weather was far too hot for tea, but the chill of the air conditioning indoors seemed to make space for it, and the death of the family matriarch called for chamomile. Aunt Christine moved with utter assuredness, as if the news of Grandma Helen’s death had come with a set of instructions.
Sipping our tea at the kitchen table, the two of us could have passed for sisters. She was only six years older than me. A surprise baby, born after Grandma Helen thought her years of childbearing were over. I had been a less welcome surprise, conceived before my mom even finished high school. My hair hung longer than Aunt Christine’s, bleached a brighter blond by the sun, and my skin held a deeper tan for the same reason, but the oval shape of our faces, the thin lips, the arching, nearly invisible eyebrows—in those ways we were almost identical.
She pulled the tea bag from her mug and dropped it in the trash, leaning over her belly to see that it landed true. Still moving with that sense of purpose, she rummaged around until she found Grandma Helen’s address book, an ancient thing with a row of gold letters on little black tabs. She flipped to the D tab, marked her place with a manicured finger, and dialed.
“Lizzie,” she said, “it’s Christine, Helen’s daughter. I’m afraid I have some sad news. There’s been an accident.” Her voice cracked a little as she explained, repeating what the sheriff had told me.
I stared at the untouched mug growing cold in my hands and listened as she called a dozen people, explaining over and over about the accident. I grew more skeptical every time I heard the word.
Grandma Helen had convinced me, after I graduated from Victorville High, not to go off to college like my friends. She even gave me a small raise for my work on the ranch, and at first I gloated about making money while my friends all took on debt, but as time went by and I saw online that they were making their way in the world while I continued to do the same shit I’d done for years, I got antsy.
I applied for a job with the Forest Service but didn’t say anything about it to Grandma Helen. Not until they asked me to come in for an interview. When I did break the news, she dropped her fork midmeal and left the room. We didn’t even argue. I cleaned her plate along with mine and reminded myself that I’d known she would be upset. It would pass.
Her objections ticked up a notch after I passed the physical exam for the job. She stubbornly insisted that she needed me on the ranch. When I argued she could hire someone to do my job—and for less—she grew sullen, hardly speaking to me for days.
It wasn’t until my final acceptance letter arrived, telling me I’d been temporarily assigned to a fire prevention handcrew in Montana, that her anger boiled to the surface and we argued about it. And the very next day there I was, sipping tea and listening to my aunt inform everyone of the accident that had taken Grandma Helen’s life. Accident my ass. She had wanted me to stay, and when I said no, she put everything in my hands and bailed, knowing I was the only one who could run the ranch in her absence. It was a dirty trick.
Three days passed in a flurry of activity. I kept my head down and my opinions to myself through meetings with the funeral director and with Grandma Helen’s lawyer. No one was terribly surprised to learn that she’d left the ranch to me. None of her three children had any interest in it. Still, everything had to be made official. Paperwork had to be signed and local acquaintances needed to know when and where we would be mourning, as if these things followed a schedule.
While Aunt Christine arranged everything, I struggled to keep up with the work on the ranch by myself. The flock could lay dozens of eggs every day in the hot summer months of the peak season. Each egg had to be collected, washed, polished, and stacked in cold storage for eventual shipping out to specialty grocery stores all over the country. Without Grandma Helen, it was difficult to keep up.
It used to be that we had a routine. Grandma Helen would lure a hen off her nest with a handful of grain while I swiped the eggs and loaded them into the wheelbarrow, and then we prepped them for shipping together. Now I had to do it all myself, and it was even harder than I had anticipated.
The third morning after Grandma Helen’s supposed accident, I parked the wheelbarrow next to one of the nests and dug some grain from a zippered pouch on my belt. I clicked my tongue the way Grandma Helen always did, and the dust-colored hen lifted her head toward me, her big eyes focused on my cupped hand. She reached with her serpentine neck and I pulled away. Ostrich nests aren’t like the nests of smaller birds, with twigs and grass like a finch would build. An ostrich nest is simply a circular indentation in the sand with a ridge pushed up around it to keep the eggs from rolling away.