The house stood in Sturgis, a little town near the Indiana border. It was empty now, leaving the lumpy green carpet that covered its interior on full display. Earlier that day, while clearing out the place, I spotted a magnet on the old fridge: “Homemaker of the Year, 1989.”
In the nursing home, we told Grandma we made her peanut soup this year. She looked up and said, “You all better bundle up. You know how Ames gets in late November.” She was referring to Ames, Iowa-the town where she met my grand- father. Once all the corn is harvested, cold wind from the northeast blows across the planes uninhibited. I’d feel it myself a few months later, on a road trip with my father and grandfather for my great-aunt’s memorial.
We stopped at a Shoney’s in Ames for lunch with a great-uncle. He used to work at the National Animal Disease Center. Over coffee, he leaned in and started talking quietly. “They say this bug came from a wet market, no way. Somebody cooked this up in a test tube, mark my words.”
From Ames, we took the rural highway west to Marshalltown. There, a non-denominational preacher gave us a fire-and- brimstone sermon on the inescapability of death without accepting Jesus as the lord. In the church parking lot there was a sculpture of a 30-foot-tall pink flamingo. The parking lot was shared with a motel called “The Pink Flamingo.”
The next night we stayed at my uncle’s place in Minnesota. My uncle bears a striking resemblance to the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. So much so that in 1992, shortly after Dahmer’s arrest, a liquor store clerk in Rockford, Illinois, called the cops on him. “That guy who ate all those people in Milwaukee just bought a six-pack of Molson’s,” she told the 911 operator.
The next day his wife, who writes mystery novels under a pseudonym, took me to see an old barn on her family’s prop- erty. She told me how, as a kid, she watched her father struggle to deliver a breach birthed calf in the old building. The farmhouse nearby was half-burned, a relic of her uncle’s bad habit of falling asleep with a lit cigarette. When the fire department showed up to rescue him from the blaze, he met them with a shotgun.
On the way back to Detroit, I veered off into Ohio. There was something I had to see. Something I read about in a book I forgot the name of. Near the Kentucky border, on the side of a dirt road, there’s a plaque marking the Confederate Army’s high-water mark during the Civil War. Many people say that’s where the South ends and the Midwest begins. I found it, read it, and got back in the car.
As I drove my thoughts wandered back to my grandmother in the nursing home, the lumpy green carpet in their empty house, and the last thing she said that Thanksgiving: “What year is this?”
