A Decent Human

When Cal first went to see Aunt Grace at Morningside Manor, he was eleven years old and cried all the way home. When Mom suggested they not go back, Cal agreed, even though he didn’t want to. He always agreed with Mom because she expected him to.

Aunt Grace wasn’t his actual aunt, but she was still family, the person Cal always turned to when he needed someone who understood, someone who listened, someone who never expected him to agree with her just for the sake of agreeing. He’d spent countless hours at Aunt Grace’s home while his mother was working, and he’d learned so much from her. She made sure Cal knew how to cook, how to identify the stars, how to play checkers, and, most importantly, how to be a decent human.

“Do the right thing, even when it’s hard,” she always said. “Be kind. And never be afraid to apologize. That’s what will make you a decent human.”

Cal knew he stopped being a decent human when he agreed not to visit Aunt Grace again. For five years he tried not to think about that, or about her, but it was impossible.

When Cal turned sixteen, he realized he was sick of being a less-than-decent human. The next day he took the bus to Morningside Manor after school, asked for Grace Touhy, and released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding when the woman at the desk gave him a room number. His relief was short-lived; when he went to the room, he didn’t see Aunt Grace, just a tiny husk of a woman with empty eyes. Cal suddenly remembered why he’d cried after that first visit, how this place bled the Aunt Graceness out of Aunt Grace.

Still, he forced himself to sit, take her hand, and talk to her. Instead of asking Aunt Grace if she remembered him—she clearly didn’t—he pumped her full of memories, reminiscing about the meals they’d prepared together, the solar system she’d helped him create for a fifth grade science project, the manga series they’d both devoured. But Aunt Grace just shut her eyes, like she was tired of him. Or worse, like she didn’t even realize he was there.

Afterwards Cal felt like crying, just like last time. But sixteen-year-old boys couldn’t cry on public buses, and by the time he got home it was suppertime, so he couldn’t cry then, either, not in front of Mom. When he was finally alone in his room, an acceptable place to leak out the day’s emotions, it was too late. The tears were stuck in his head like glue, and he had no release from his sadness.

He went back the following week with a potted violet. Aunt Grace used to have a garden, a riot of color that Cal took for granted until the new people moved in. Now there were just shrubs, always slightly brown.

Aunt Grace looked at the plant the way Cal wished she’d look at him. “Viola papilionacea,” she said finally. It sounded like a disease, but when Cal Googled it he discovered it was the violet’s scientific name. He tried to be impressed rather than disappointed that Aunt Grace remembered the flower’s name but not his.

The next week the violet was gone. Cal couldn’t get up the nerve to ask the woman at the desk about it. Maybe someone knocked it and broke the pot, or stole it, or threw it away so it wouldn’t have to be watered. Regardless, it was gone, and Cal was filled with a simmering fury that Aunt Grace couldn’t have something green and flowering.

He vowed to give Aunt Grace flowers she could keep. That evening he dug through his closet until he found the bag he’d stashed there five years ago. It contained seven skeins of yarn in a rainbow of colors, two crochet hooks, and a dozen squares with flowers blooming in the middle, some of them (his) quite wonky, others (Aunt Grace’s) perfect.

Aunt Grace had taught him to crochet the last winter she was home. He’d protested at first, saying boys didn’t crochet, but she insisted that was nonsense so he reconsidered. He’d enjoyed it, once he got the hang of it—it was a way to work out the day’s frustrations through his fingers.

They’d been making an afghan. Aunt Grace’s idea, but Cal went along with it, even the flowered pattern she’d chosen. He picked up the hooks now, and was surprised how easily it came back to him—the loops, the pulls, the fastening off. His sadness poured out of his fingers more easily than tears. The blocks were still wonky, but he didn’t care, just kept going, one or two a night after he had done his homework or just needed a break. The bright colors sang to him, making him feel like he was warm and safe on Aunt Grace’s couch again.

When he finished, the afghan was a rainbow monstrosity, but Cal folded it carefully and took another ride on the bus. He spread the afghan over Aunt Grace’s bed, over the small lump in the bed that was Aunt Grace, and watched her run her hands over all the colors and then beam, perhaps in pure happiness that colors still existed in the world, that flowers could still bloom, even in this drab room. Cal sat and talked—not memories this time, just the humdrum of his day—and he didn’t care that Aunt Grace never looked at him, that she couldn’t take her eyes off the crocheted flowers.

Maybe, deep down in that part of her mind that still knew the scientific name of the violet, she recognized the afghan for what it was: both an apology and a thank you. Cal hoped so. She was the most decent human he knew, and he wanted her to know that deep in her bones, where she could never forget.

Valerie Hunter teaches high school English and has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines such as Cricket, Cicada, and Paper Lanterns, and anthologies including I Sing: The Body and Brave New Girls.