Sunlight filtered through the interior of my grandmother’s 1993 Buick Century as the garage door slowly rose from floor to ceiling with the push of a yellowed plastic button. The old door rattled and groaned as it moved reluctantly from one resting place to another.
Grandma settled deeper into her seat behind the wheel while I fumbled clumsily with the belt buckle on the passenger seat. All these years later, I can’t remember if Grandma regularly wore her seat belt—my instinct is that she didn’t, but my instincts are often wrong—but I had a religious commitment to mine. I’d seen enough commercials showing human-shaped dolls flying in slow motion across fields of broken glass, their placid limbs flapping at odd angles, to be terrified of taking even the shortest rides without them.
The Buick rumbled to life when I finally put both ends of the locking mechanism together and looked forward. The sun stretched its arms over the dashboard and along the windshield as the garage door came to a stop overhead with a thud.
“Finished?” Grandma asked, or something like that. One hand gripped the steering wheel while the other put the huge sedan into reverse.
I was, and I told her so.
“Let me know if you see any cats while I’m backing up,” she instructed. It wasn’t just an awkward request. There were as many as five cats living in and around our house at any given time. The garage, filled with the many artifacts we deemed unworthy of our main living space because they weren’t so unworthy to rid our lives of them, provided countless perfect hiding places for fearless cats.
With her eyes raised to the rearview mirror and the winding driveway beyond the open garage door, Grandma slowly guided her car into reverse.
I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did next. Certainly Grandma had done nothing to cause even the slightest bit of mischief to her beloved grandson, and it was not in my nature to play pranks. Even mild ones. But having a motive means that there was a reason for doing something. A little bit of planning or thought went into it.
This wasn’t that.
“Mrroawrrr,” I said.
I hope my spelling conveys how perfectly, in that thoughtless split second, I have replicated the sorrowful cry of a hidden cat being slowly and painfully crushed under the rear tire of a 1993 Buick Century.
At that point in her life, Ruth Ann Wilcox was no longer a young woman, but her reflexes at that moment were those of someone at least a few decades younger than her. Mere milliseconds after I’d unleashed my near-flawless imitation of a cat being emptied like a tube of toothpaste – just a hair’s breadth away from instantaneous – my grandmother had brought her hulking car to a halt. Only then did she start screaming; practically before panic.
I remember her saying something like, “Oh no!” or, “Who did I hit?” or something like that, her voice full of horror.
Although I have never been the most agile mathematician, by then I had already calculated the depth of the mess I was in, and quickly worked on the solution to get out.
Crawling seemed the best answer.
“I’m so sorry, Grandma!” What I was.
“I don’t know why I did that!” Which I didn’t do.
“Everything is fine! No one was hurt!” What could be seen.
In the many years I knew and loved her, I had seen my mother’s mother display a variety of irritated looks when confronted with situations that irritated her. When my parents brought home new quirky animals. When one of us would come across the wrong brand of cottage cheese. When Ohio State played terribly.
None of those looks came close to the intensity of the look she gave me that day.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she told me. Her tone suggested that a second joke would ensure that there would never be a third.
“I won’t do that,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever meant two more words in my life.
“Don’t do that,” she said. I don’t think she ever meant a single word in hers anymore.
Slowly, Grandma took her foot off the brake pedal and rolled the Buick back through the garage door into the sunlight. Her eyes returned to the rearview mirror. They were no longer looking at the stretch of twisting concrete beyond, but at me.
