The grandson is put in a cottage near the beach. The ocean. His grandparents told him a grown man has to live somewhere. Somewhere not with them. And twenty-four is grown. The grandfather had been to Korea and back by twenty-four. So the grandson was put in touch with a realtor and the realtor knows a landlord and the landlord rents a cottage for the winter. Rent is cheap in winter. There are no tourists yelling or drinking in the streets. When the temperature drops below twenty, a hypothermic mist slithers above the water, dancing in the whitecaps.
The grandson finds a job making muffins at a bakery. No experience necessary. Baked goods are popular year-round, and there are enough locals to sustain business off-season. Two hundred per day is his quota; that’s how many muffins you can bake in seven hours, minus thirty minutes for lunch. Blueberry, oat, walnut, pumpkin spice. The peppermint hot chocolate muffin, a Christmastime favorite, is the grandson’s invention.
The grandson used to be a son. His parents were surfers. They would have liked his new place, his new independence. The parents took paddleboards out on a flat, warm day and never came back. The grandson was sixteen when it happened. He stood on the beach and watched his parents shrink into the egg-yolk horizon. There are sharks out there, the grandson knows. And seals with vampire teeth. Sandbars shift with storm tides; rogue waves appear.
At the funeral, the grandmother gave a speech and pointed toward the sky as if the parents—her son-in-law and daughter—were riding a cloud toward biblical Heaven.
The grandson brings free muffins to the grandparents’ house, a dozen at a time, even though it’s not something the grandparents request.
The grandfather is worried about his blood pressure, his cholesterol. The muffins are high in fat, loaded with butter and processed sugar. But delectable, the grandfather says. A vice he can’t deny. The grandson adds dollops of Crisco to the batter and delivers the muffins twice a week until a stroke leaves the grandfather upright in a hospital bed, making crooked faces before a coronary several days later. But the grandson isn’t sure his muffins did the killing. The grandfather smoked cigars, loved ribeyes, ate blue cheese and chicken wings on Sundays. And the grandson doesn’t think he delivered the muffins with cardiac death in mind. But he can’t be sure about that, either. He gets angry sometimes. There was that afternoon when he was eleven and the grandfather was drunk. The grandson doesn’t like to talk about it.
At the funeral, the grandmother gives a speech to a small, wrinkled crowd, jabs her finger at the cumulus sky. Together now, she says. Father, son-in-law, and daughter.
The grandson keeps delivering muffins until the grandmother tells him to stop. She visits him at the beachfront cottage. They sit and talk in the living room. Grandson, she says, I know about the afternoon when you were eleven. She tells him about another drunken afternoon: the grandfather in tears, admitting what he’d done, clearing his conscience. She walked the grandfather to a cathedral and stuffed him into one half of a two-chamber booth, a clergyman in black filling the other. The grandfather confessed his sins before God. The clergyman was gracious and understanding. A year of Sunday eucharist and ten hours of community outreach distributing prayer books to the homeless. After that, everything was okay.
The grandmother is shaking as she speaks. Veins in her arms and legs are rotten purple against off-white skin.
The grandson tells the grandmother what he’s been telling himself for thirteen years: he doesn’t want to talk about it.
He says the grandmother could use some exercise and squeezes her into one of his old wetsuits, sits her on the nose of his twelve-foot paddle board, steers them out to sea, waits for a wave to knock her off, watches her flail for a second before going under and then rides a swell back to shore—more skilled, better balanced, than his parents.
The bakery caters the funeral. The grandson unveils a new muffin for the occasion: cranberry thyme. He gives a speech and points his finger four times at the sky. All of them together now, he says, riding the same nimbus puff. Look carefully. Right there. You see it?