The week after we rummaged through my grandmother’s house for keepsakes, we headed back to Maple Falls to attend, as guests, my grandmother’s memorial at the Northwest Hills Community Church. My mother never shied away from a lengthy road trip. We shot up Route 542, trailing Mount Baker. The mountain—a dormant volcano that had once been a glacier—made me feel my mother growing more tense as she steered toward the familiar ache of home.
She cranked the volume on a tune we both adored, a little pep talk for us Sloopies: Hang on, Sloopy, Sloopy, hang on!
She drove with a wild, heedless ease, always, as unruffled as a seal in a traffic jam, backing through intersections to avoid circling blocks. She would blow through red lights, not slowing for yellows, insisting it felt like a green. Most times there was no officer in sight, only a chorus of frustrated neighbors honking. These tiny flouts piled up into a belief that we were exempt from rules—but also resented, distrusted, and marked as different.
When we reached the church, we were steered toward the worship hall. We slipped past a cluster of navy-suited men, then paused, unsure where to sit. We wore thrift-store black, dulled to slate with age. An elderly woman in a proper, ink-black dress and sensible heels waved us forward and guided us to the pair of waiting chairs opposite the pulpit.
Up at the front, the projector hummed. There, fiddling with the remote as it cycled through the same few images of my grandmother—smiling, waving, our pale eyes, holding a pie—stood my aunt Nell. She sniffed and shuffled back to her seat from behind the podium. I stole glances but kept from meeting her gaze. I worried that if I met it, I might turn to stone, or worse.
“Of course she’s putting on a show,” my mother whispered. “As if she’s some delicate flower.”
My mother and I did not cry. It would have been unfashionable to pretend sorrow. I tried to imagine what grief would feel like, if I could feel it. Perhaps like a heart neatly cleaved in two, spilling its sticky juice, like the baobab fruit cracked open by the stylish monkey in The Lion King, my favorite vintage cartoon.
Grandmother had been devoutly Christian, if not always observant in the usual ways. Her sleepy house—dusty and quiet—was dotted with doves and angels painted in a grayish terra-cotta. They seemed meant for the outdoors, to be brightened by rain rather than fading into dull gray on her shelf. I hadn’t seen them, or her statues, since my mother severed ties after a dispute over the house—the house my mother believed had rightly been ours.
From what I could tell, my mother, chasing the dream of home ownership, had combed the classifieds for weeks and landed on a neat two-bedroom place with a down payment she was just short of, the kind of thing that seemed to follow her wherever she went—“just.” My grandmother had offered to help, which my mother read as her grandmother buying it for her, and she moved forward under that illusion. When the illusion shattered, she cancelled the moving van, swallowing the late-fee the customer-service line refused to waive, and then she stopped speaking to her mother for five years.
The rift between my mother and Nell felt nebulous, difficult to trace. I braced myself for the inevitable confrontation between my mother and Nell, an artist who lived in New York. Nell seemed clever, quirky, quiet. Edgy, cerebral. Otherwise preoccupied. I’d met her a handful of times. There had been a reconciliation, a fragile truce between the two sisters in my kindergarten year. Nell hadn’t fared any better with their mother than my mother had—a fact that alone could rekindle their bond, only to burn out in a dramatic clash. I always felt Nell enjoyed the idea of children but wouldn’t have known what to do with me for long.
“It wasn’t entirely Nell’s fault,” my mother admitted. She claimed their mother had set them against each other as children. She was intensely jealous. “She felt we didn’t love her enough for us to let ourselves love each other. We had, for a time, anyway, in spite of her. I was my sister’s guardian.”
Once, apparently, Nell had tried to shove my infant mother off their grandmother’s lap. Supposedly, Grandmother had longed for a son, convinced that boys were naturally devoted to their mothers. She was weary that her daughters hadn’t shown the same interest in her.
“She’d say to us, ‘You girls would cry anytime I held you. You didn’t like me.’”
I wished she had kept her thoughts to herself. Now she was merely gray dust.
In my earliest memories, Grandfather smelled like floor cleaner. If I asked, “What about Grandpa?” my mother would shudder. “It’s so odd to hear you call him that, Jellybean. He just sort of disappeared. Grandma was the only one truly present in the house.”
My mother believed that anyone who moved to New York—like her best friend from college, Bonnie Vowell, who settled in Connecticut, or her sister Nell—carried with them a certain presumption. It was the place you went if you fancied yourself too fabulous for anywhere else. If you needed not just a Fifth Avenue but a Broadway to go with it.
“Nell always felt superior because she did this thing she did”—my mother meant art—“as if she were God’s gift to creation, as if she had a direct channel to something more meaningful than my own ordinary life, as if she were plugged into something real, while I wandered around, dull and uneducated.”
I felt burned, indignant on my young mother’s behalf. “Saint Nell,” I teased, making the sign of the cross with a smirk.
“Believe me,” my mother said. “It was suffocating to grow up near that.”
“I bet.”
She said their mother had bought Nell’s posturing. “That’s something you should know about people, Jelly. They believe what they’re told. If you tell people what you do is important, they believe it.”
Though she spoke in a dig, I stored away the idea—that others’ perception of a person can be manufactured with ease. I used it, too. At school, I told the other kids we came from some venerable, old East Coast line. I tumbled out vague hints about Nell’s greatness and insinuated that we’d declined inheritance on principle. And they swallowed it whole.
Spinning these tales to my peers gave me no pause. I was the Lady Eve, reinvented from one of my grandmother’s old VHS tapes. I was Miley Cyrus peeling off the Hannah Montana persona and riding a wrecking ball. It was deceitful, but it felt exhilarating.
“Nell clung to art,” my mother said, “because it kept her from facing what lay in front of her. I preferred to keep my eyes open. There are consequences for that. But at least I knew what was real.”
I began to see what had happened between them. Life opened like a zipper, first dividing them painfully, little by little, then more quickly, until the garment hung split in two. Nell chose Art. What did my mother choose? Freedom? Motherhood? Or had she simply drifted?
“Anyway, don’t talk to her.”
I could tell my mother was uneasy about handing funeral logistics to Nell, by how she vented about Nell’s decisions, errors of judgment she swore she would never make. “Those corpse-green ranunculus wouldn’t have been my doing, but Nell has always had a distinctive sensibility.” She shot me a look. “Might have been the quaaludes in the eighties.”
I watched Nell closely for any sign of those quaaludes. With my mother, sometimes a seed of truth appeared. Nell wore black Converse sneakers.
“They look like clown shoes,” my mother whispered. “With those rubber tips. Clown shoes for her mother’s memorial.”
I was eleven but looked about nine. That age where people feel the need to protect you. It helped me. I was small enough to slip under things, to collect coins from beneath a gum rack. I could order from the kids’ menu. I played a hand in this. My mother favored me when I appeared babyish, soft and dependent.
On most topics—especially anything about my aunt—my mother dictated the stance. I wouldn’t have known how to form my own. Yet I worried. What if Nell, after all these years, still had a magnetism that rivaled my mother’s, and used it to carve out something successful? I had no idea what to expect of her.
Afterward, there were cups of coffee in the meeting hall. It was customary for the family to stand at the back and greet whoever remained. The projector went dark.
My aunt greeted me politely from a distance. The hair we all shared remained visible even when pulled back. You couldn’t forget yourself. I offered a small smile to signal I bore no grudges toward my mother, but I wasn’t sure she noticed. Nell didn’t seem to think much of people, not even herself, dedicated to her art. She never used my name. I sometimes wondered if she even knew it.
My mother had no choice but to acknowledge her sister. They inched toward each other, settling at each other’s side. They had both tried to tame their frizzy hair, neither succeeding. “Nice flowers,” she said.
“You think I would order those cabbagey ranunculus?” Nell replied. Her lips were thin, unlike mine and my mother’s full lips. As if she’d tasted something she didn’t like. “They smell like feet.”
My mother nodded; she had been wrong. After both sisters had abdicated planning the memorial, the front desk volunteer at a church my grandmother no longer attended took over—the casket, the readings, the flowers. I felt slighted by my delinquent grandmother. I had the sense that she had let something slip through her fingers, and now, dead, she left behind a planless space.
We were interrupted by the introduction of the young pastor who would lead the service. He patted my head. Sensing something about us, he mentioned that the church hosted secular community events: local author readings and pancake breakfasts. If we stayed a few days, we might be interested. My mother said she hated pancakes.
Seizing on that, he excused himself, leaving my mother and me with the dwindling circle of acquaintances, a handful of friends and distant relatives, which included Nell. There was a table of instant coffee in Styrofoam cups, with little creamers and boxes of Entenmann’s mini muffins, but neither woman took a plate. Nell listened with polite interest as they traded in fond, if fading, memories. They spoke softly about my grandmother’s habit of fishing candies from her purse, and there was soft laughter about how she never quite got the pastor’s name right. “In time, we all just called him Pastor Richard, too, so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed. I think even he began to get a little confused!”
My mother did not crack a smile. I watched as she made a decision. She turned to Nell. “Remember when she threw away your journals and told you I’d done it?”
The small crowd shifted in their chairs. I could smell the sour ranunculus blown in from the worship hall.
Nell was quiet. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”
My mother snorted. “I’m sure you don’t.”
Nell slumped lower in her chair. “Don’t start.”
I kept very quiet. I, too, hoped my mother would stay steady. We were a package deal. If she sometimes behaved like a witch, what did it matter as long as our shared path kept me from plunging solo through the atmosphere?
“She treated us like dirt,” my mother pressed on.
Nell gestured as if conceding the floor. “Here we go.”
I thought of Grandmother, projected on the screen, holding out her pie.
“She was not a mother, really.”
“Folks,” Nell addressed the neighbors, “the wine hasn’t even started flowing.”
Yet my mother was not a drinker. She spoke with unvarnished honesty, a gutter-wide honesty that overflowed when it struck a nerve, no matter the timing. It was a quality I admired, even as I cringed. I was humiliated, yet I was also my mother’s daughter. It fit the pre-teen version of me—the urge to speak my mind, to stand apart—as long as it stayed within limits.
My mother fixed Nell with a chill, and the room cooled in response.
“Oh, because you’ve made peace, right? No, you haven’t. You’ve rewritten history, and that’s a trap. One that will come back to bite you.”
Surrounded by elderly couples in solemn ceremony, all in seats pressed close, some holding hands, crumb cake at their feet. People who did not challenge tact or courtesy, who kept things straightforward. Grandmother had been one of them. She had died, and she deserved to be remembered.
“Let’s rein it in a little,” Nell said with a quick smile. It seemed impossible that Nell and my mother shared the same bloodline. They’d grown up under the same roof. They’d shared the same history. “Let’s save the score-settling for later.”
The truth was, my fancy New York aunt, the artist Nell, disappointed me. She should have been dazzling. It was nearly there, but she didn’t seem to be enjoying herself. She wore a cloak of passive aggression, like a weight around her neck.
“There’s a reason it’s called a memorial,” my mother said. “I have a right to remember her as she was, with all her damaging complexity.”
Nell, in one last effort to check her, said, “I think you’ve made your point.”
An old woman nearby spoke to me, presumably thinking a child shouldn’t hear this about her grandmother, assuming it was the first time my innocent ears were hearing the grown-up version. “Do you like crumb cake?”
I nodded. I was good at this. If she knew what I’d overheard.
As we rolled into Corvallis, the Diamante parade was halted for a passing display. A marching band strutted by, the drum majors wearing polyester Tumwater Middle School shirts. I felt a surge of hostility at the delay. My mother disliked the pretentiousness of jazz, yet she bobbed along to the pep-band beat. It took a few minutes for them to pass. In that pause I realized the sting I felt was more than mere irritation with an uninvited performance. This idle, mismatched throng belonged to something larger, I thought—a code of ritual and belonging that I did not share.
“See how she behaves toward me…,” my mother began, grief turning to grudge, her ultimate takeaway from the afternoon. She was drafting an interpersonal map, a tool she revisited now and then, summarizing her relationships on a single sheet. “. . . sanctimonious, as if she’s a realized person and I’m not.”
I understood what she was doing. She was trying to make sense of things. A circle with “me/Helene” sat at the center, the axis from which the web of conflicts radiated. One offshoot pointed to Nell, another to their mother. A few more to the usual suspects, the village that surrounded their lives, orbiting around her. I noticed I wasn’t listed. I was part of her world, but not worth mentioning.
*
Nighttime was the hard time. I distrusted her attempts at fun. Once, after a spree of merriment, she woke me up, claiming bugs crawling on her scalp. We found nothing, but maybe she did see something. Former landlords lurked in bushes or waited in cars outside our home. She made people mercilessly resentful, and I wondered if the apparitions were real. I remembered the neighbor who had shouted from his window: “Hey, little girl, your mom is a bitch!”
I’d seen it with my own eyes. Hadn’t I?
By the time I turned ten, sharing those double digits with her, I saw her through a veil of sanity that had grown between us.
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From Heavy Cream by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright. Used with permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright.
