Dead End.

I stand outside of the door inventorying the details, the chipping edges, the long strip of unveneered bark exposed by time, the hole my brother left with a pick axe. Nothing has changed in the time since I left, except for the tiny latch that keeps the double doors closed, there is no sign that any time has passed. I open the door. The house is cleaner than it has ever been in the years we lived with my grandparents. The couches, which were always more accustomed to things sitting on them instead of people, are clear and welcoming. The floor is clear. Everything organized onto shelves. In the middle of the living room sits a folding table and chair. And my grandmother. I sit down in front of her. She does not look at me.

“He’s really gone, Matthew,” she said. Her eyes clear and uncluttered by tears.

“I heard,” I said.

“He was so proud of you,” she said, gesturing at the trophies from debate victories stacked on the shelf.

“I know,” I said.

“I wish he could have seen your graduation,” she said.

“I know tutu, I know.”

My grandmother sits across from me at a cheap plastic table and explains to me the way my mother called the ambulance and tried to force air into my grandfathers broken lungs. How she tried to squeeze more life from him. The paramedics tore open the double doors to fit the stretcher into their home. The floor was cluttered then and they pushed everything off to the sides, parting the red sea of our lives. Then they carried him up to the ambulance. It was too late they said.

My grandmother and I sat at that folding table for maybe twenty minutes. Neither one of us cried.

            “It’s funny,” she said, looking at the silent television. “Yesterday, he was sitting right there watching Nascar.”

            “Yeah,” I nod my head in agreement.

            “I think he knew his time was coming without knowing, you know,” she was still watching the black screen, as if it were a crystal ball. “Last week, he made up with his brother and they settled his mother’s estate.”

            “Wow,” I do not know what to do in this situation. I think all of this is a coincidence. It means nothing. But my grandmother has cleaned up the entire house for this moment. She keeps on cleaning.

            “And he never gets travel insurance, but he was supposed to go to Vegas today and this time he got travel insurance, Matthew he had to know,” she looks directly at me, as she says this.

            “Of course, it’s funny, how we can know these things,” I say. It’s all funny—if you laugh long enough. Forget the punch line. Forget the joke. Forget the timing. Just keep laughing until you cry. That is the moment it is funniest, when it hurts to laugh more. 

We do not cry at the card table. Instead, my grandma smiles, as she spots a large mottled moth in the corner of the room. “Look Matthew,” she said, pointing it out. “It’s grandpa, watching over us.” Both of my grandparents believed that moths were the souls of the dead reincarnate. After, my grandpa’s mother died, there was a large moth waiting for us in the living room and he had said, “look it’s great-grandma.” I’ve always thought it was a Japanese cultural belief, as one of my mother’s boyfriends, Mr. Okamoto, also pointed out a moth after his grandpa died. But the Internet reveals that it is a cross-cultural belief that transcends any single culture just like dragons and everything in ancient aliens. A mass delusion does not a truth make.