Submitted by: R
Topic: Laundry detergent
Word limit: 583
It just so happened that the summer after Bestemor died, Chris played with the Windy City Thunderbolts. The team’s home field was a few minutes’ drive from Bestemor and Bumpa’s house, so he stored most of his belongings in a locker downtown and brought some essentials for a temporary stay at the home we’d both known our whole lives. Like most minor-league baseball teams, Windy City was short on host families; there were no more beds when Chris joined the team in late June (after Northwestern’s later-than-everyone-else commencement), and the team wasn’t too concerned with the housing of a player who seemed comfortably settled with nearby relatives. This was how he wound up expanding a few days’ stay into living with Bumpa for months.
The fact of their coexistence didn’t turn out to be noteworthy. Their schedules were so different that often, the only time they spent together was at home games. I heard little bits about how much food Chris ate, or about Bumpa’s passive-aggressive communication via Post-It, but for the most part they seemed satisfied with the arrangement. Chris had lived with roommates for years, and knew to take his clothes out of the dryer and wash his dishes. The rest seemed to be grumpy old man rumblings.
That summer was Chris’s modest foray into professional baseball. I correctly suspected that the Midwestern venues of the Frontier League would be as close to my home as he would be for a long time, and vowed to take advantage of the relative proximity. Weekend after weekend (after weekday, sometimes), I drove to Kalamazoo, Chicago, Rockford. Game after stupid game, my brother never left the bullpen. That’s the danger in going to nonconsecutive games to see a relief pitcher: he plays on the one day you can’t be there.
It was after one such game. Whether or not he plays, a baseball player nightly showers off the dust of the field and emerges from the clubhouse in fresh clothes. We hugged each other in a way that said seen you recently, see you again soon, but we both traveled to be here so hello again. When the hug ended, Chris had a little smile on his face: hidden, expectant. I knew there was something I had missed — like every Easter egg hunt, he figured things out first.
“Smell my shirt,” Chris said.
I touched his arm and put my nose to his shoulder. When I pulled away in realization, his smile had grown to that familiar grin of satisfaction at a joke well told.
“You smell like Bumpa!” I shrieked.
I made him confirm that he was wearing his own shirt. He was. I smelled the shirt again.
There was no question. The smell was the smell of Bumpa’s closet, of every years-old nubby polo shirt, of my bed at home when he would nap there while visiting us. It was so pervasive — strong enough to compete with the linger of Bestemor’s cigarette smoke, the other smell in their house — that we had both assumed it was the smell of Bumpa himself; we equated the smell with him. It was the smell of every Christmas with our grandparents, and it came in a box. If I asked Chris the name of the detergent, I’ve since forgotten it. If I knew, I wouldn’t buy it. It is enough that for one summer, my brother lived with Bumpa, and did laundry in his garage, and the smell of clean old man rubbed off on him.