My Grandmother and the Ghost of Brody

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“We were very poor,” she says to me in the small living room set close to the street, a redwood fence and gate separating the lawn from the sporadic traffic of Sunland, California, her brown eyes fixed on my face through their rimless spectacles which have just now become fashionable again. “Honey,” she adds this final word to the sentence. Her love for me and her poverty are eternally linked now, one braided with the other in some mysterious realm, her voice tender and almost hushed as she recalls her life as a girl to the girl that I was.

We were speaking, then, of a house without running water.

And Little Grandma would trudge to school past the house of her wealthy relatives, often stopping at the back porch to receive a bit of pastry or a cookie from the cook. It was there, having been invited in for some reason, that she first saw water running from a tap, such an inexpressible luxury that it still brings an ecstatic look to her eyes in the telling.

All progresses in an orderly fashion. One pair of shoes. One dress. To school, back and forth. Poor house, no water. No more details ever spoken of. As if her entire childhood of want is painted in pale gray: flora, fauna, streets, other dwellings, where she slept, ate, awoke each day, nothing remarked on, embroidered, or touched with light.

“One day,” she continues, “I saw a ghost, honey.” And...