It’s time to take a day off and write. Julie spreads the days of the work week out like a quilt as she decides when to “not feel well.” Skipping Monday or Friday will read like an excuse to extend the weekend; Tuesday is believable but may mean she misses something important from her boss; Thursday is also believable, but when she takes Thursdays off, she can feel her life stretching out past her fingertips, past the five little boxes of the work week, and it’s dizzying.
Pulling words from the lips of her great-grandfather Silas for her first novel already verges on the surreal. The man has been dead for forty years, and Julie never met him, but these days she’s appointed herself as the teller of his story, which means parsing through the past in a voice connected to her own only by a shred of genetic material.
She chats her team on Wednesday to say she has a fever and opens the creaking door of her childhood bedroom, calling out to her parents that she’s running errands. She knows her father can’t hear her. What makes her think he’ll buy a hearing aid now, after twenty years of near-deafness? But she doesn’t have it in her to repeat herself this time and starts off down the street, laptop in backpack thumping gently, affirmingly, against her back.
Inside the coffee shop the walls are splotched by coffee and dotted with notes and photos from customers past. Julie finds a seat by the window and arranges her items on the little table: laptop, notebook containing a character list and plot outline, her great-aunt Sally’s scrawled anecdotes about long-dead family members upon whom Julie’s character list is based. Great-aunt Sally is also dead. Julie then pulls out the photograph of her great-grandfather in her possession. Silas glares at her over his mustache. Another photo, from an unknown time: six children lined up in front of a house.
Julie is not sure she can explain to herself or anyone else why she feels compelled to these people. A lineage of unsmiling white men and women who built up their grim little cabins and farms across a stolen America—they reek of a time and attitude long since fallen out of relevance and favor, and for good reason. Julie does not like these people. She doesn’t write about them out of love or filial devotion or anything else that can be pinpointed as she mulls her decision over as she writes.
Julie writes about these people because she can’t shake the idea that they are all she has. What’s that about? She’s not without friends—though admittedly most of them live in Brooklyn or L.A. while she festers in this small town. She has parents gracious enough to let Julie live with them rent-free. She’s been here for almost a year ever since Troy broke up with her for the second time, the final time. Julie also has an older sister, Melody, who loves her to pieces and posts childhood pictures of the two of them weekly, takes Julie for drinks at the fancy new cocktail place downtown when she visits. It’s Melody’s doodles that line Julie’s notebook. On Melody’s last visit home, the two stayed up talking about Julie’s writing as Melody, with her longer train of memories, sketched the dead relatives.
“I think great-grandma Anna probably had the jowls,” Melody said, tapping out an email and sending it before returning to Julie’s notebook, where she began to draw. “You know. The ones Sally swore she didn’t inherit.” She smirked. The sagging face of a woman came into focus under her pencil.
“And her daughter was Martha, Dad’s grandmother,” Julie added. Grandma Martha had died when Julie was only seven.
“Yeah, I actually remember her,” said Melody, adding volume to a new character’s head. “She always had her hair done, for family stuff, even just to run to the store. The amount of hairspray she must’ve gone through—”
“Who needs the ozone layer anyway?” Julie said.
Melody flicked her pencil around a faint, well-coifed grandma Martha. “Not her.”
Each little face shimmered in pale graphite. Melody had always been an exceptional artist, but had opted to get a master’s degree and work in tech. Julie couldn’t draw or get a job in tech. Not that she had tried very hard at either.
Now Julie orders her coffee and eyes the cinnamon rolls. Around her, stroller moms and auto shop workers chat and guffaw. Neighborhood dads bring in wild-eyed dogs anxious to sniff everything. A few tense women her own age with beige manicures scroll furiously on smartphones.
Julie surveys the graveyard of personalities she has rather selfishly resurrected over the café table for her first novel, and takes out the final item: the steel spoon. Dented and scratched from age and use, it was her great-grandfather’s and he may have made it himself. No one’s sure. Family rumor keeps it in precious limbo. It completes Julie’s altar/workspace, and she begins to write.
She finds that she can usually prompt something from great-grandpa Silas when she opens the document—complaints about the fluid pricing of iron, the pimpled new preacher at church, his eldest daughter’s cooking. Julie imagines him as a proud man, but unafraid to speak often and at length to his children, often squeezing in a dry punchline or two. The spoon vibrates on the uneven table as Julie types up a new scene. Silas is navigating a disagreement with his wife, Clara, a German immigrant seven years his junior.
Money is tight. Both spouses think the other is being unreasonable, but no words are making sense to Julie. She shuts her eyes, trying to feel out the answer in the shadowy realm behind her eyelids. Maybe this is a better strategy to connect with the dead and the fictionalized. Julie feels her brow furrowing as she concentrates on Silas and Clara’s fight.
Someone taps the back of her laptop screen.
She surfaces without her ancestors’ replies. Leaning on the table is Tom, another shop regular, who has expensive-looking tattoos and who always tries to talk to Julie when she’s here.
Julie has tried many times to feel whatever it is that Tom exudes as he approaches her. She’s entranced by the idea of a small-town romance, and the pang of Troy’s absence makes Tom a compelling candidate. But whenever Tom catches sight of her, a smirk creasing one side of his face as he makes his way across the room, Julie is suddenly and precisely embarrassed to be alive.
Now he drops into the opposite chair. “Thought you fell asleep or something,” he says, and the corner of his mouth shoots up into that half-smile.
“It was something.”
“What’s that?” He leans in unnecessarily close until he’s nearly eye level with her.
“Something. It was the something other than being asleep.”
Tom chuckles. “I bet. Who’s this guy?” Tom picks up the photo of great-grandpa Silas.
“That’s my great-grandfather Silas,” Julie says. There used to be a ketchup stain on the far windowsill that she has sought out the last few times Tom’s come to talk to her. She quells a surge of hatred for the employee who has finally cleaned it up. Now she has nothing to stare at in the middle distance.
“Whoa. That’s a great mustache. Are you researching his life or something?”
“Something like that,” Julie says.
“Really! Tell me about it.”
Julie feels her organs slide down into her shoes. “It’s something I’m doing for my family, I guess. His parents immigrated from Germany in the late 1800s, and we don’t really know much about him. So that’s what I’m working on.”
Tom’s face is much too serious for this insubstantial answer. He studies the picture with unnecessary reverence.
“Actually, I should probably get going. Nice seeing you,” she says, and as politely as she can takes the picture back from Tom. Julie might have more disdain for Tom than she even feels for herself. She has written not quite 300 words.
“Where were you?” Dad asks when she returns. “And where’s your mother?” Rather than call or text Julie’s mom, Dad tracks his wife by questioning Julie a few times a day. He eats a piece of bread smeared with jam and talks through bites.
“I don’t know where Mom is. Probably with the garden club.” Julie sets her backpack down, rummages in the fridge for lunch.
Dad stares out the window as though trying to process this information. “She hangs out with them too much. All they do is plant flowers and gossip. Waste of time.”
“Mmm-hm.”
“And where were you?”
“I took the day off.”
“You did what?”
“I took the day off to do some writing. It’s a mental health thing, Dad.”
Dad regards her as if she has admitted to reading other people’s mail. “A ‘mental health thing’? When you already work remote? Your generation is really something, I’ll tell you. Like you need days off from your days off.”
“I work five days a week and sometimes I take a day to do something else. The organization is fine without me for a couple of hours.” What she doesn’t say is that she’s never happier than when she’s not responding to her nonprofit job emails, where the founder bemoans the lack of donations and team morale at least once a week. Or when she’s skipping the daily Zoom meetings, where coworkers tell long, meandering stories about their children at swimming lessons or soccer practice. Julie doesn’t get it, never has. Most days she feels as if she were trying to learn a new language underwater, interacting with these earnest mothers. Her precious hours with great-grandpa Silas in the coffee shop ease the tension that builds up inside her like bladder stones.
Dad shakes his head. “You live here for free and you still can’t handle a week of work.”
“Oh, come on. You’re telling me you never did that when you worked?”
“What’s that?”
“I said, you never did that when you worked? You never took a sick day?” She knows instantly this is the wrong thing to say.
Dad sets down the toast. “You think I was that lazy? I had two kids to feed! I was lucky if I could rest when I got the flu. You should think about that when you’re out playing hooky.”
“I will,” Julie buts in, knowing if she lets him go on he will start a performance, reminiscing about a poverty the family has never experienced.
“Good. Where’s your mother?”
“I don’t know, Dad. Why don’t you just call her?”
“Huh?”
“I said why don’t you just call her?”
Dad waves his hand as though batting away a fly. Just then, Mom opens the front door, the remnants of a smile on her face dwindling as she steps inside.
“Look who it is!” Dad’s smile is big and cold. “Finally decided to show up.”
Mom takes off her jacket. “I was out with garden club, Howard, I must have told you three or four times last night.”
Julie flings a bag of sliced cheese back into the fridge, trying to avoid the inevitable second part of this interaction.
“The girls bought us all hats,” Mom is saying. She opens a bag and reveals a straw hat with artificial pink flowers glued around the dome. It’s exactly the kind of thing craft stores sell at discount in September. Mom puts it on and her smile comes back.
“Ugly,” Dad says without hesitation. “Tacky as hell.”
Mom tries to hide the disappointment and embarrassment washing over her face and takes the hat off.
In her room, Julie returns to meditating on her great-grandparents’ argument when her phone lights up with a text from Melody to the family group chat:
“Ahh I got that promotion!! Comes with a 6% raise, I can’t believe it!!”
Seconds later Mom has sent kiss, balloon, and confetti emojis, even as she continues to bicker with Dad in the kitchen.
Melody again: “They admitted they created the position with me in mind 😀 this is so surreal!!! Love you Mom!! Julie, how are things going with the writing?”
Julie lays her head on the desk. She closes her eyes, but this time it’s to give in to a gray, shadowy feeling. She wonders if this sensation hovers over all would-be writers, or just her. She misses Troy. She’s not going to cry. She hasn’t even finished her sandwich yet.
Sit up.
The phone is dark, the room empty.
Julie doesn’t hear these words, exactly. It’s as if the echo of a voice reverberates in her bedroom. She looks around. Mom and Dad are in the final throes of their argument downstairs; no one stands outside her window.
Straighten your back.
“Where’s this coming from?” she calls out. Her voice quivers, though she does indeed fix her posture.
Dad yells, “What?”
“Nothing,” she hollers back. Drops her voice to a whisper. “Who is this?”
No answer, but her eyes fall again on great-grandpa Silas. Never has his mustache seemed so impassive, his colorless eyes so full of indignation.
The words are like little ghosts. But even the word ghost feels too solid, too substantial, to describe what Julie feels as she processes this voice that is not quite a voice.
Sit up and get to work.
Hands sweating, Julie abruptly ceases the argument with Clara and skips to the next scene. She can all but hear Silas’s words now, flowing as easily as water, as he holds his first grandchild, noting that the baby’s eyes are as comfortingly colorless as his own.
Two weeks later, Julie takes another sick day. All of her coworkers are getting flu shots, wilting the next day from little fevers and aches. The chat is full of people taking a day to recover, so Julie tells the same story, then wakes up early to snag her preferred spot in the coffee shop.
Orange leaves dapple the light on the walls, but Julie hardly notices. She’s written eight pages since Silas told her to straighten her back, eight pages capturing her ancestor becoming an ancestor as he beholds his grandson.
Julie’s fingers pulse with sparkling revelations. Silas was moved by the births of his five children, but something about holding a grandchild has shifted the world a few degrees. My children affirm my presence in this new land, but upon the arrival of my grandson, I felt the land seek affirmation in him—his every giggle and cry, the glancing of the morning light in his eyes.
Julie sits back in the chair, pleased. The old man’s murmurings provide the comfort of a sweater, and she relishes the process of transcribing his thoughts. She cracks her wrists a few times as she hammers out another three pages. Keep going, she feels Silas intone somewhere just out of view. Keep working. They continues to chill her, the words of this not-voice hanging in the air, somewhere between promise and threat.
In another corner of her mind, Julie goes back to picking at the argument between Silas and Clara, searching for the note of pain in their disagreement. Julie must resolve this scene at some point. What is Clara telling her husband?
But Tom strolls through the front door, orders, high-fives the barista. Clara and her point of view are gone. Julie slumps behind the laptop screen. It occurs to her that as she continues to patronize the coffee shop, Tom may think Julie’s into him, or at least open to his advances. She makes a mental note to look for other places to write.
Keep working.
Yes, great-Grandpa Silas. She types with fury, her words neither well-crafted nor authentic, bordering on gibberish, her face tensed, sending out the strongest “Busy” signal she can manage, just to deter Tom from showing up at her table.
But he has already approached her. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
“Back at it, huh?” He cocks his head and sits opposite Julie. Then, in a move that stuns her, reaches over to ruffle her hair. Julie partially ducks, so that he only musses her bangs, his fingers awkwardly bumping her forehead. “You’re such a little workhorse, aren’t you? Still writing the story about your grandfather?”
Somewhere under her shock, Julie feels an insatiable urge to correct him. My great-grandfather. It’s a detail that always gets lost when she discusses this project with non-family members and it eats her up. If her ancestors are all she has to mark her place in the world, the timing of their relationship to her is crucial. Otherwise it’s all a fiction.
Julie opens her mouth to respond. Closes it again. Tom is watching her, looking mildly sheepish for his transgression, but the upturned corners of his mouth dare her to punish him for it. And then Silas’s not-voice lands in her head: Let him state his intentions.
Julie actually laughs. Now her main character is in on this? Her own relative wants her to give Tom a chance?
“I guess I am,” she finally says. She pauses. “Do you like me?”
His mouth drops open. A light pink flush comes into his face and he grins. “I mean, yeah, you’re pretty cute.”
Julie’s stomach feels warm. Maybe she has been too harsh. Maybe it doesn’t matter that his mustache has a pastry crumb in it. He has more or less stated his intention, per Silas’s instructions, and in a friendly manner. She can at least reply in kind.
“Thanks. That’s nice of you.”
He laughs, throwing his head back and running a hand through his hair. “Shit. Thanks. Hey, how come I’ve never gotten your name?” He pushes his phone toward her.
This is also a form of stating intention, Julie recognizes. “It’s Julie.” Silas is still in her head, showing her the gray-eyed baby, his arms trembling in wonder at the warm bundle of new life. Flashes of her ex-boyfriend are here too, in Tom’s smile and in Julie’s barricaded memories of Troy’s arms around her. “It’s my great-grandfather,” she adds, smiling back.
“What’s that?”
“It’s not my grandfather I’m writing about, it’s my great-grandfather. His name was Silas.”
Tom smiles. “All right, my bad. So can I take you out for a drink, Julie?” He leans over and ruffles her hair again, and this time, Julie does not duck.
“Ooh, a date! Is he cute?” Mom’s voice and face are calm, but Julie knows she’s elated. She wanted Julie to find someone else within three minutes of Troy dumping her. Ever since Julie moved home, Mom advertises the sons of the garden club women weekly. She always starts the same way: job description, company name, and the mother’s most recent estimate of his salary.
“Kind of,” Julie relents. “He’s been after me for a minute in the coffee shop, always stopping by my table and chatting me up.”
“What’s his name?”
“Tom.”
“Is he cute?”
“He looks fine.”
Mom twists her mouth. “I’m happy for you, sweetie, I really am. It’s been so long since you had a nice boy in your life.”
Dad has just woken up, and stumbles into the kitchen. “Where’ve you both been?”
Julie and Mom look at each other.
“I was taking a writing day,” Julie admits.
“Again? How are you keeping this job?”
“It’s a miracle,” Julie says.
Dad turns on Mom. “Why are you letting her play hooky like this? She lives here for free and doesn’t even work half the time. Blows my mind.”
Silas is back, his keep working becoming a deep drone in Julie’s head. As she heads to her room, she hears Mom say, “Howard, she has a date. Sometimes these kids have to get out of the house, they have to meet people!”
At her desk Julie shuts her eyes. Silas ceases his imploring, switching to a report of the steel factory’s recent activity. Julie looks at herself in the spoon, tilted and shiny, almost entirely blotted out by the bedroom light.
All things considered, the date wasn’t as bad as Julie had feared. She reviews it in bed that night. It’s a nice break from her parents’ chilly interactions, the meaninglessness of the nonprofit work, and the pages and pages of great-grandpa Silas.
Tom had behaved with a kind of anxiety-driven courtesy, opening doors for Julie all night and handing her napkins when she dribbled her drink. The meticulously easygoing, tattooed exterior melted to reveal a man channeling a grandfather, uncle, or other older relative steeped in old-school courtship. Tom adapted this behavior so easily, it was obvious that he was scared.
The conversation was plain, inoffensive. Just enough surface-level information blended with childhood memories to leave Julie feeling as empty as her beer glass by the end of the night. She had not liked it when Tom scooted his bar stool closer and closer to her every few minutes, or when he grinned and blushed each time she met his eyes. It made her feel like she had to study the door behind him to keep him calm as she talked. But he didn’t hog the conversation or make a big show of paying for the drinks. So that was nice, she supposes.
“Tom and Julie,” he had giggled. “It’s like Tom and Jerry, but different. Better. We should make our own cartoon show.”
“Totally. I’ve always wanted to be a mouse.”
“You kind of are, though, with your big eyes. The cutest mouse in town.”
She squirms at the memory. If nothing else, she reasons, this will make a good story for Melody next time she calls. A date is almost equal to a promotion in the family’s conversation currency.
Plus, it has made Mom happy. Mom’s love is as warm and enveloping as a bath, her acceptance total. But beneath the bubbles she wants two things for each of her daughters: successful careers and husbands. Never mind Tom’s doofiness and overly stylized veneer—as long as he isn’t overtly cruel, he’s a prospect. Mom has been asking for updates from Julie faster than her phone can light up with Tom’s texts, which have been many, half of them ending in Tom and Jerry GIFs.
Now Julie ends her Friday night listening to her parents argue.
“Pointless,” she hears Dad yelling. “All of it is just pointless. I still don’t even understand why she had to move back in.”
Mom’s tone is pleading. “She doesn’t have to, but rent is expensive. She’s saving her money right now!”
“She should stop being so lazy and just get a better job that can support her living on her own. That would be the best option.”
“Howard, you know she’s still sensitive after the whole Troy thing.” Mom’s voice has lowered, like Troy is the name of a fatal diagnosis.
“What’s that?”
Julie flinches under the covers.
“Her ex-boyfriend, Howard. She’s here because he dumped her, remember? What should we do instead, throw her out?”
“I’m not saying to throw her out, I’m saying she should stop being so lazy, taking days off all the time and barely making any money.”
Great-grandpa Silas flicks into her vision, the steel factory appearing behind him, groaning under the weight of its own industry.
Mom and Dad’s voices grow fainter as they carry their fight into the bedroom and shut the door.
Julie gets out of bed. It’s Friday, and she lets her arms rise up on either side of her, trying to touch that feeling of infinity. She goes to her dresser mirror, turns on the light, stares at the reluctant reflection. The moons under her eyes have deepened, but something in the set of her mouth looks out of place. Hopeful. After studying the old picture of great-grandpa Silas for months on end, she realizes she can no longer find his face in her own.
The new coffee shop is sleeker: white walls and black trim, dried lavender bundles, rustic baskets cradling baguettes and ciabattas. It’s Julie’s second time here in a week, a week she has spent responding to work emails with renewed professionalism and speed, and volunteering to catalog old donations. She has ploughed through so much backlog that her boss has actually told her to take a day off. Dad couldn’t believe his ears with that one. She told him twice—the second time, admittedly, because he didn’t hear her the first time—but still. His shocked silence was a tiny prize.
Silas is accessible but distracted as Julie traces back the story to the argument with Clara. She eyes Melody’s doodles lining her notebook. Silas would rather share stories of his grandson learning to walk, but Julie closes her eyes and steers his focus gently back to the disagreement with his wife. She reminds him of his own mantra: Keep working. She is so intent on her work she doesn’t hear the steps of buckled boots coming toward her, until she opens her eyes and sees Tom, his eyebrows pointed up at the ceiling as though in prayer.
Her stomach melts. In addition to putting in overtime at work, Julie has also spent the past week ignoring Tom’s many texts, or at most, throwing in a “lol” when total avoidance seemed impossible.
“Julie,” Tom calls across the room, his voice pitched in an odd way. “There you are.”
She gives him her Zoom introduction smile, twists the Silas spoon in her lap. “Hey! How’s it going?”
He smiles back, relief seeping into his face. “Where’ve you been, little mouse?” He crashes down into the chair opposite her, his leather jacket creaking as he lifts his elbows up onto the table. “You hiding from me? Too busy with your grandfather’s story to get back to old Tom?”
The spoon is digging into her thumb’s cuticle, but she won’t release it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she stretches her arm out for great-grandpa Silas, but he offers nothing besides his favorite topics: the first steps of the new baby, profits at the steel factory.
“No, I’ve just been really busy with work this week.”
On an impulse, Julie reaches out for great-Grandma Clara. The darkness yawns around her
And Clara, unlike Silas, is there, as though she’s been waiting for Julie for years, her presence full of warmth and tension, a coiled spring bent down for too long, wanting nothing more than long-delayed release.
Get out of this place, she implores, her voice harshly accented but strong. I would have told you before if you had asked. Go now.
Julie is shaking. Her mouth is dry, her tongue sticking to her teeth. She closes her laptop. Stands up. The chair screams against the floor.
Silas’s head is thick with selfishness. So many times I wanted to leave him. I would have taken that ocean again every day for a year if it meant I could be on my own.
There is a wire running from Julie’s head down through her toes. The words feel like a church organ, its notes plummeting to earth from a terrifying heaven.
“Tom, you’re nice but I don’t like you.” Her hands can barely maneuver the laptop into her backpack. “Please leave me alone.”
She knocks her iced coffee to the floor. Tom is watching her, mouth ajar, silent. The coffee pools at his boots, and she wants to say, “Move your feet, idiot!”
But she doesn’t. She only pulls on her backpack, keeping her spine straight, her eyes upward. The sky is hard and clear beyond the door.
Tom says, “What?”
I would have told you, Julie, if you had only asked!
Julie is walking, passing the breads and fancy honeys. Her heart vibrates in her chest. Clara. Sunlight strikes her cheek and she is filled with a slow, pure anger. Of course it should have been Clara.
Julie doesn’t have to say anything more. Clara is speaking with enough conviction for both of them, her voice bright in the stuffy air of the car, as Julie turns the key.