Page 30 of Not My Problem

“Sure, let me get my stuff.”

My grandmother looked between me and her neighbor. “You’ve been staying here the whole time?”

“Yeah, I felt weird about staying in your house when I’d never even met you,” I explained. “Gretchen put me up here.”

She hurried over to give Gretchen a hug. “You’re such a good friend, dear.”

I met Gretchen’s eyes over her shoulder and smirked. If only my grandmother knew exactly how much of a friend she’d been.

“Gretchen, please come join us for dinner tomorrow after work.”

Gretchen looked towards me. “Are you on shift tomorrow, Zoe?”

“Wait, you’ve got a job here in Seattle?” my grandmother asked in surprise.

I nodded. “I got hired for an on-call shift at a family homeless shelter.”

Grandma’s smile was huge. “That’s great news. Do you work tomorrow?”

“Not until Tuesday, unless someone calls out sick.”

“Well that gives us plenty of time to get acquainted then. And we’ll have Gretchen for dinner to thank her for all her help.”

“It really was no bother,” Gretchen said. “But you know I’ll never say no to a home cooked meal from you Jan.”

I grabbed my duffel from the guest room and followed my grandmother over to her house, ignoring the stab of pain that hit my belly as I walked away from Gretchen. She looked sad about it too, but we’d both known this was coming.

“This was your mother’s room,” my grandmother told me as she led me into the bedroom that was the mirror image of Gretchen’s guest room. “You can stay in here.”

If I expected my grandmother to be tired from her trip I was wrong. She bustled around checking on the house, then when she remembered that she didn’t have any groceries she brought me with her to the grocery store, asking me what I liked.

She kept up a constant chatter the entire time, telling me about her trip and her friends and asking me casual questions about hobbies and my life in Chicago. I realized after a while that she was nervous, which made me like her even more. She had to care about me and what I thought to be nervous.

“What do you want me to call you?” I asked when we sat down for dinner.

She frowned. “What do you want to call me?”

“Does grandma work?” I asked.

For a second I thought she was going to cry. “Yes, Grandma works just fine, dear.”

After that she seemed calmer. We both waited until after dinner to bring up the elephant in the room.

“I suppose you want to know about what happened with your mother?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“She never mentioned me or her grandfather?” Grandma asked.

“No, whenever I asked about our family she just said that she was an orphan, and she didn’t know who my father was. But she always kept this little metal lockbox with her, every apartment we went to she brought it, and after she passed I went through it and realized that it wasn’t true. We did have family.”

“Your mother was a troubled girl,” Grandma began. “We probably spoiled her too much as a child, I don’t know, but she grew up to be a willful and defiant teenager. She was always fighting with her father and putting me in the middle. She started drinking and smoking pot, coming home high as a kite. Back then pot was illegal, it’s not like it is now, and your grandfather was very upset. Well, we both were.”

Grandma took a deep, shaky breath.

“Your grandfather worked closely with the police since he was a district attorney, and one of his cop friends told him that your mother was selling drugs. The police had been watching her and her boyfriend and were preparing a case against them. We were beside ourselves. We didn’t raise our daughter to be a drug dealer!”

She stopped, staring into space.