2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Basement
by Michael Hettich
Hanging my grandfather’s undershirts on the line
down in the winter basement, my grandmother danced
a little jig when she thought I wasn’t looking, and laughed
when she realized I’d seen her. So I danced too and we shared
another secret. I loved to follow her
down there, to explore the damp dark
while she ironed and folded and told me things
I don’t remember now. So in Denver, years later,
I rented a basement apartment and huddled
down there without a phone, down the back stairs where no one
could find me. I hid myself so well that when she died
no one told me for a week. Too late to fly home
for the funeral, or to cry much. She’d been very old.
Her husband, my grandpa, had died twenty years earlier—
just mumbled goodbye one afternoon
while we were walking, holding hands; he turned away
from my father and me on the sidewalk and shuffled home
in the sun. She found him when she came up from the basement,
sitting on the edge of their bed, and she saw him
fall back with a sigh when she came in, as though
he’d wanted to look at her one more time.
My father and I were still out walking, telling stories
in the cocoon of contentment we often inhabited
in those days, as though we had actually vanished
into our own private world.
106 Santa Fe Literary Review