Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [40]
“Uh, hi.”
After a few minutes of grandiose and grossly inaccurate bragging about her granddaughter, Gladdie asked Moe to get her walker.
“Well, guys and dolls, I gotta shuffle off to my room for some good old-fashioned girl talk with my granddaughter, here.”
Moans of disappointment all around.
“I’ll be back in time for arts and crafts, don’t you worry.” Then she clasped Moe’s hand and gave him a wink. “And I’ll see you later.”
Moe lifted her hand and gave it a gentlemanly kiss.
Was that . . . ? Could that . . . ? Were they . . . FLIRTING? I could barely wait to get to her room to interrogate her about what I had just witnessed.
“Grandma! Have you landed the pick of the litter?”
She looked at me with uncharacteristic coyness.
“Oh my God! You have! You have a . . . a . . .”
“A boyfriend, J.D.,” she said. “I’ve got me a boyfriend.”
Gladdie told me all about their courtship. The flirtatious glances over the Yahtzee cup, the long conversations in the dining room over bowls of goulash, the hand-holding during Sunday-afternoon showings of Abbott and Costello. It all sounded very, very sweet, yet very, very distressing. I mean, imagine discovering that your ninety-year-old grandmother has a better shot at getting laid than you do. Not a pretty picture, now, is it?
“So! I hear that you’ve been letting those towel-head lunatics get you down,” Gladdie said, relishing the political incorrectness only tolerated in the elderly.
“Yes.”
She sighed and sat next to me on her sofa, a dusty, rusty-brown velvet job that makes me sneeze if I sit on it too long.
“Look, kiddo. We were all quaking in our boots during the Big One. Still, I had faith that our nation, the greatest nation in the world, would pull through and show those bastards what they had coming to them.”
“But this is a different kind of war, Gladdie.”
She didn’t even listen, she kept right on going about her contribution to the war effort, how she sold war bonds and worked in the Federal Office for Price Administration, whatever that was, and bartered coupons for nylons and pork chops.
“I took comfort in doing without because I knew it was all for the greater good. We all made great sacrifices, none more so than those boys who lost their lives. Tragedy was part of our daily routine. But through it all, I never understood the point of being sad when I could choose to be happy.”
Of the incessant jumble of words that have tumbled out of my grandmother’s mouth over the last ninety years, I would doubt that any were more perfect, or more profound, than those.
“Don’t stop doing what you love,” she said, tenderly patting my knee. “Don’t let your future be ruined by a bunch of loony sand monkeys.”
And with those words, the wise sage turned back into the mortifying big-mouth I’ve known my whole life.
Gladdie obviously lives by the “choose to be happy” philosophy. She always seems happy, something I’ve long attributed to her senility. But maybe she was born that way. While it may be in her blood, it’s just not easy for me. I think Bethany got all the happy genes.
I’m still scared about the future. Actually, I’m petrified beyond words, which is why I can’t write about it at length. Though Gladdie did help me today. It’s small and stupid, but I realized that I can’t keep doing what I don’t love, starting with cross-country. I don’t love competitive running. Never did. Now that my transcript is locked and loaded, why should I still participate in an activity that I hate so much? I should be doing something that’s important to me and isn’t just providing unnecessary padding for my college applications. The only glitch is that I’ve been living for college admissions officers for so long that I don’t even know what I like to do anymore.
I need to work on that.
October 1st
Dear Hope,
Pineville High has certainly taken our President’s advice to heart. Everything here is back to normal. Our Class Character elections perfectly illustrate