Lock & Mori by Heather W. Petty Page A

spent an entire month of Saturdays after my mom passed attending various advertised memorials, just to study the mourners—to figure out how I was supposed to be feeling, or maybe acting. Because all I felt was numb—a numbness I knew showed on my face and in my every movement.
    I’d seen loads of women who sat with a quiet strength, the tears in their eyes never falling throughout the service. Some seemed disconnected from the service entirely, as if wandering through the secret rooms of their mind, thinking things we’d never discover. I even saw one woman who whimpered through the entire service, held up on all sides by grand­children. I watched as she reached out and petted each of their ginger heads in turn, and how they snuggled closer to her at the contact. I remembered thinking I would have been the one grandchild to scoot away from them all, separate myself, not wanting to be touched. Not that my grandmother would have dared touch me.
    My earliest memories are of grandparents. Not mine, but I suppose they had to be somebody’s. My grandparents moved across England like it was their job to live-test as many houses as they could before they died. I couldn’t blame them forhating their houses enough to want an escape. Their lives were so noxious, they’d probably escape their own skin if they could. Unfortunately, they kept escaping that toxic together, and it was the together that made their homes so toxic.
    Instead of blaming each other, they blamed the houses, even when it meant hemorrhaging their fortune in fees and underwater mortgages or abandoning an unsellable cottage to the elements. My mother left at age fifteen, when the money ran out and they were forced to live in a tight little row house on Baker Street—our house now, as it turned out. Her sister, my aunt Lucia, escaped into a hateful marriage of her own only to return when her husband ran off to Austria or Australia or somewhere else that started with an A .
    My memories, though, are of someone else’s grandparents—the kind who live out in the countryside. Cornwall, perhaps. They both had long, flowing white hair, hers kinked with a natural curl, his spreading down his cheeks to cover his chin. Their house was blue, and the backyard lush and green with grass and fruit trees and giant garden plants that reached for the sun from soil so rich it looked black.
    I’d toddled along the tiny path that allowed them to tend their plants, and they’d picked ripe fruit and vegetables for me to taste test. I remembered liking the tomatoes and strawberries best. I’d also liked when they looked from me to each other, and then moved to hold one another around their waists, as if there were magnets in their loose-fitting gardening trousers. Magnets that only attracted each other. Magnets that didn’t let go, even when I ran up to show them a ladybugor flower blossom I’d discovered in the shadows under the leaves.
    My parents had magnets as well. Not the kind that fit together with a gentle click, more the kind that pulled and strained until one side or the other was yanked savagely back into place with a large thunk that sent shock waves through them both. I do believe they loved each other, just not in that gentle, peaceful way the grandparents in the garden had discovered. My parents loved each other with blustering rows and stormy silences. They did nothing halfway, nothing ­subtle. They wrapped around each other to kiss in the kitchen, ­wrestled around the living room screaming with laughter, and fought so loudly, only his badge kept them both from being hauled away on a domestic.
    As loud as they were, I don’t remember a single word they said in those fights. Only the noise. Now our house was always quiet. Us tiptoeing our way around the sleeping, sobbing giant in the corner room. Him brooding and grunting and hiding himself away from us. I sometimes wonder if he misses the noise like I