IN HER HANDS

BY PHILLIP LUNA IV

Five
She held my hands, in her hands. My fingers brushed across her skin. She felt like paper, crumpled and uncrumpled, again and again until it has become soft and fibery.

Seven
We played a game: I would scribble on a page, and she would take my scribbling and draw it into something real. She always made it a show, turning the page each way to determine what my lines might become. Her hand would guide the pencil and suddenly a loop became an ear, a scratch became a snout, and a fortuitous dot became a whisker. It was magic.

Then it was my turn. She would scribble on the page, something much less complicated than I had given her, and I would try and make it into art. She told me, "If it looks like a tangled mess, just look at it a different way." And we both made a show of turning the page this way and that.

We put our pictures on the fridge.

Eight
The jigsaw puzzle was 2000 pieces, the biggest one we had attempted. We spread the cut-outs on the table, flipping them right side up to look for the edges — always the edges first, that was the rule. She would take a piece between her fingers and scrutinize its shape and color.

We lost a piece after that first time, in the unexplained way small things sometimes disappear. So, every time after that we built a 1999-piece puzzle instead.

Nine
There is a special tool for opening a clam, but I never learned the name of it. Because shucking and cooking and eating is not the fun part when you are nine years old. The fun part is clamming.

It was the perfect tide for clamming. I kicked off my Vans, rolled up my blue jeans to just below my knees, and followed her out into the water.

“Look for the bubbles,” she told me. That's where they'd be.

We had spatulas and forks and sticks — any utensil we could find really. We jammed our tools into the mud to dig, and then our hands into the hole we made to catch the clams before they could burrow deeper. When you felt something, quite like a rock, you grabbed hold, pulled it out, and tossed it into the bucket.

I expected our hands and the mollusks to be covered in mud — gritty, sandy, salt-water mud. Instead, they pulled out clean, the ocean water wiping away any trace of silt. I thought it funny, how we could dig into the muck and pull out something so pristine and pearly white.

Ten
I was finally taller than her (which is just to say I'd reached the five-foot mark). We sat at the picnic table in front of her house and pressed our hands together as a measurement — my fingers barely an eclipse to her own.

Twelve
She taught me how to clean a fish at the picnic table. My first real catch was a three pound black bass. A fisherman's wife, her practiced hand was immediately clear — an angled slit below the gills, a cut along the abdomen, and easily the entrails were pulled free. It was a surprising dexterity I hadn't seen in her before.

Fourteen
On the holidays I would help in the kitchen, when I was finally old enough to be helpful. She made homemade rolls for every big family meal. Flour, yeast, salt, water, and the dough between her fingers as she mixed — her mixing was an ingredient itself. She would cut a chunk of dough then tuck, twist, and turn it to make a perfectly round bun. The oil gleamed on her hands, accenting their lines.

I told her she reminded me of a body builder, the way they oil themselves up to get an extra shadow and make their muscles stand out. Except instead of muscles, she had wrinkles. She laughed at this, because she understood my sense of humor and we had a habit of teasing each other.

I liked her laugh.

Twenty-one
Later, much later, that day at the beach, my son clambered across mounds of sand, grinning at the waves and sea foam. He was two years old then and didn't know any better.

I looked at her face and was ashamed when I had to look away. Between the sobbing and the bitter coastal winds whipping the strands of her white-blond hair was a face so taut with pain that to call it grief would be remarkably unclear. Hers was the face of a fisherman's wife of fifty years as she watched her husband's ashes pour into the ocean, and I don't know the word for that kind of loss.

Two of her daughters stood at her sides, linking arms for support, both physical and emotional. And I couldn't look at her face. I couldn't look at her face, so I watched her hands instead. I watched her hands as she squeezed her daughters' arms so fiercely her knuckles turned bone white, and it seemed their color would never return.

Grief tasted like salt to me, the salt of tears and of the Oregon coast.

Twenty-eight
Much later still, when she visited me in prison for the first time, we played Scrabble because there were no jigsaw puzzles to choose from. I watched her hands for a different reason that day, as she was one who often played with an extra tile. She had a well-known likeliness for mischief and thought a part of every board game was whether you could catch her which, most of the time, was more fun anyway.

The once delicate and fine lines that crossed her fingers, knuckles and palms were replaced with heavy indents and shadows that made me thoughtful of how I spent my time with her.

Thirty-four
The last time we ever spoke was over the phone. She was in a way where I might have to remind her of who I was and she sometimes couldn't find her words.

I asked her if she remembered the game we played, where we would try and turn our scribbling into art.

She said she did.

I asked her if she was disappointed in me, that I was calling from a prison phone instead by sitting by her side.

She said she wasn't. And then she said, “If it looks like a tangled mess, just look at it a different way.”

I couldn't remember telling her I loved her in a real way. Not in the way you say it at the end of a phone call as a means of goodbye or how you might write it at the bottom of a birthday card. The way you say it when you want to tell someone what they have meant to you over the years and how you would have been lost without them. When I told her all of this she just laughed and said she already knew.

Her laugh.

My grandmother's laugh was like apple pie dusted with white powdered sugar and cinnamon-butter crumble. | PL

PHILLIP LUNA IV IS FROM THE BAY AREA. HE IS OF HISPANIC AND WHITE HERITAGE. WRITING IS PART OF HIS JOB AS EDITOR OF “THE ECHO,” EASTERN OREGON CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION’S NEWSLETTER, BUT HE’S ALSO FOUND IT’S SOMETHING HE ENJOYS RECREATIONALLY.