Chapter Thirteen
Vienna

A mess of National Enquirers puddles onto the floor beneath Gram’s coffee table. It had been my job as a child to go and rearrange the “newspapers” in the home’s downstairs bathroom—the client bathroom—and place them back in the basket next to the toilet. “Might take their mind off things,” Gram had said. 

Troy finally makes contact with my eyes. He’s strung out. His pupils have no place to go, uncomfortable in their sockets. His fingers are nicotine-tinged, grasping an empty bottle of Jack, and I remember those fingers stroking our mother’s hair when she would lie on her back on the living room floor. “You are the greatest thing, Troy,” my mother’s breath would say. Her arms and legs would swim like a snowless angel. I would watch them, knees to chin, affixed to the living room recliner. Now Troy’s fingers pull and pinch at a scab on his face. 

“She here?” Gram’s voice is lighter shoved against four walls than inside the earpiece of a phone. She walks into the living room from the short spurt of hallway space. She makes sounds that are hard for me to digest. 

It’s even harder to look at her.

Beautiful. That’s what people called Gram when she was still Frances Molony and her cinnamon hair flirted with the curve above her buttocks. But she isn’t Frances Molony or even Frannie Oaks. She’s just Fran now—hair grey and curled, defiant against the crown of her head, her limbs fat and burdened with the crux of living and a tooth is missing at the side of her mouth.  She reaches down to tie her shoe, and the bandage on her left leg buckles and spreads the mouth-watering reek of infection.

“Yeah.” A simple syllable from Troy’s direction. “She’s here.” I can feel the world stumble and start as Gram works her breath and body upright. I think “beautiful” and believe it, even though it should taste like a lie.

“Welcome to my humble abode.” She shuffles around to the recliner and pops its footrest like an erect tongue. It’s the same chair that sat in my childhood living room. The same chair my mother used to stuff vial-sized bottles of alcohol into. He couldn’t stand it anymore, my father, so he donated it to his mother’s apartment—a “parting gift,” as Gram put it. It’s the color of dishwater. Dingy and lifeless. It fits the apartment perfectly. 

“Thanks for finally having me,” I choke. My skin cures with sweat, and there’s still a hint of fruit on my fingers, even though I’ve washed them clean with a handy wipe from Loretta’s glove compartment. There is no air pumping through the vents, no windows open. The outside stays where it belongs behind an accordion shade and a sheer curtain stained from the curls of Troy’s smoke. In the car, I had swallowed a handful of chalky meds after Troy stopped peeking from the window, and the blind popped back in place. I should have swallowed the bottle.

Gram grunts and picks at a twisted cluster of hair above her ear. “I’m not the one having you. Your brother—” Fran pauses and rubs hard between her breasts. A wheeze drives a bullet of spit onto her slacks. “Ow...your brother orchestrated whatever the heck this is, and I told him I’d be willing to talk to you.”

“Don’t make it sound so innocent,” Troy says. His finger works the roofed sections of the shade. It zips with each hard swipe. “You need her.”

“For what?” I ask. I rub my nose and look at the corner of Gram’s peeling apartment. The odor is dancing, talking, running its perverted fingers through my hair. Greasy taco wrappers heap into a wobbly mound around the trash can in the kitchen. They’ve become a tiny, wet, sweating monster. I concentrate on it to keep from staring at Gram’s flirting wound. To keep from tasting it.

“He won’t talk to me.”

“Dad?”

“No.” Gram nods at the photo of Granddad on a warped sofa table shoved against the wall. There’s a small TV there, a blank-faced plastic box keeping watch over a man who smiles gaunt-faced in a suit.

“You don’t visit him.”

“Would you?” she asks, addressing the wound that rots on her leg. No, I think. I wouldn’t want him to see me that way either.

“I write him, though. I write him every week, and he used to write back, and now he refuses to.” Gram strums her clump of hair. Her nail is eclipsed in a dirty shadow. When her hair used to be auburn, and she would fit the stiff drum of her body into multi-colored swirls of rayon, she would watch Troy and me for the summer at the home while Mom used the time to “sober up.” I would watch my grandparents from Granddad’s office floor, paper and crayons a mere excuse to feel the way they interacted in my skin. Two people who loved each other, a modest, heart-sparking sort of love. The only time I saw something similar from my parents, it was my mother contorted into my father’s heavy, tired arms, and in the act of leaning into each other, they began dancing, swaying at their hips. It could have been something lovely if Mom would have quieted her dreadful sobbing or if Dad wasn’t drying a small clump of vomit on his shoulder. But still, there was a quiet beauty there in our living room that night, an intimate need for their bodies to keep them upright.

“You don’t know how it feels,” she whispers. Her hands are out of her hair. They are lost in her lap.

“No, I don’t know,” I say.

Gram pulls a wilted tissue from her pocket. She blows with her entire body, and the last shake she takes into her hands leaves her body still. “Uh...his last letter. That one was a real groin kicker,” Gram says. She massages her lower lip with her upper one, a line of wrinkles along her mouth working like piano keys. “He said I’m disgraceful or something. Doesn’t like what I’ve said to you, your father, that money hungry fool clinging to Elbert like a foot wart.”

“Loretta isn’t a foot wart,” I say. It was hard to understand as a child how Loretta—the woman who swept in moments after my mother’s death—could be anything other than a flesh disease. It’s easier as an adult knowing how she sacrificed just so I could go to school with clean clothes on my back, and my father could play house in the home. A woman who would spend all her time, all her money without a chance of a ring on her finger is hopelessly hopeful. But a foot wart she isn’t. 

“Defend her all you want. It was her money and that grocery store’s that took away the only life I ever knew.” Gram’s brown eyes are expiring. Death ash black, the same color they turned the early morning Granddad was arrested, and she stood barefoot in our living room, speechless. Her feet were as dark as her irises, having walked the half-mile to our house. I don’t argue with her, don’t say it was Granddad’s poor choices that ruined everything Gram was accustomed to. I don’t say Granddad may have hammered the stake, but she was the one who wedged the divide. 

“So why now? Why does he care now what you’ve done to us?” I give one of the bland white walls of Gram’s apartment my meanest stare, and as my vision hazes, I become entrenched in my mother’s viewing. “Forgive me,” my father had said that day, his arms hooked around his dead wife’s neck. An anchor. A blabbering fool. An embarrassment in a pair of wrinkled pants. His knees kicked against the coffin having a fit with the lacquered wood. The crowd had thinned out. Troy was outside getting high behind the shed where coffins were sheltered and stacked. Gram was in the bathroom, presumably reshuffling a heap of Enquirers to keep from watching her only child collapse like a dead star. Granddad was there, close to my shoulder. His quiet was always the loud sort packing my ears with the vital hum of existing. He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder, a guilty hand knowing if he were ever caught for illegally selling bottles and bottles of formaldehyde, the only person who could stand in his place was clawing at a cold body and buckling at the knees.

“He sent that letter a while ago,” she admits. “But I haven’t stopped writing.” I want to ask her how long it’s been since she’s heard from my grandfather, but I’m afraid I’ll lose her if I do. I wonder if my father knows any of this—that Gram doesn’t visit Granddad, that Granddad has stopped writing. He doesn’t talk about his visits. He keeps them all for himself.

“Then why are you asking for my help now?” I ask.

“She’s lost. She has no purpose.” Troy’s voice moves slowly at me, but it’s so soft, I can hardly grasp it. The light of his cigarette quickly catches up to his fingers. He digs it into a plate on the coffee table, smoldering out any leftover spark. “She’s finally realized this.”

I look up at Gram, and she avoids my eyes. Anyone else and Gram would have summoned the energy to pop them in the mouth but not Troy who’s smirking at the dirty air.

“What do you need me to do?”

“He’d talk to you. So, I need you to see him. Tell him I’ve changed,” she says. “I’m changing,” Gram adds and rolls her eyes to the water-stained ceiling.

I can’t speak for a small moment. He is different and old now, Granddad. He lives in a cold little room, and that’s where he sits in my mind, his long limbs clothed in pajamas, his suits having been burned into stale heaps of ash. He only exists now when I need him to—when Wyland has broken me, or has gotten me pregnant, or my father buries his affection under the flint-sharp stones of reality. But all the other times Granddad’s placed back in his cinderblock room, a dolly no longer needed. A man whose heart is lost and possibly cavorting out in the ether with my own.

“Okay,” I say, not the way Troy would say it for Gram’s benefit, for the benefit of keeping their damaged wounds smothered in the same salve. I say it for myself. “I don’t know if he’ll add me to his visitor list, but I’ll send him an email. See what he says.”

“Okay,” Gram mumbles, her attention stolen by a stash of bills and their envelope tongues papering the counter in the kitchen. “Send this too, will ya?” Gram grunts out of the recliner and limps with precision to the TV stand. Next to the framed picture of Granddad, there’s a box and Fran reaches her hand into the cavity and retrieves a sealed envelope. “Give him this if you can. And don’t read it.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” I say. Gram nods and stands in front of me. The shielded glow from the window burns her edges, and this dark version of her is more like her old self. I stand up inches in front of my grandmother and swallow Gram’s lump of “criminy,” as her thickly cut arms hug me tight.

“Eat something. Seriously. That brother of yours knows where the good tacos are if you haven’t noticed,” Gram says nodding at the overflowing trash can. I smile and receive the empty feel of standing alone.

“All right, enough of the family reunion. I’ll show the Sausage out.” Troy picks himself up and sways, finding his balance. He takes me gently by the wrist, and I trail my brother as Gram shouts, “And don’t mention this to that busybody father of yours! And tell him I want those cuff—” Troy shuts the door behind us on “links,” and my eyes take a beating from the sun. We walk out to the Prius, and Troy kicks the busted-up bumper. “What happened here?”

“I had a lot on my mind, except for the curb apparently.”

“That’s what you get for going eco-friendly, my friend.”

“Actually, that’s what Loretta gets for going eco-friendly. I just get to save up and have her bumper replaced.” The density of the situation takes a swipe at my stomach, but I hardly notice. I’m focused on Gram, Granddad, the thought of mending relationships I had deemed broken and placed in the garage sale pile of my mind.

“The cat lady lets you use her ride, huh? Pretty sweet deal.” Troy reaches into his back pocket for his smokes. In the sun, he is out of place. His khaki shorts hang low on his hips and are stained with splashes the color of coffee.

“Why is it she gets on to me for not eating when you look like you could use a sandwich?” I say, nodding at Gram’s apartment.

“What can I say, Sausage? T-Rex is untouchable.” I laugh and roll my eyes at him but stop when I see his unlit cigarette limp against his thigh.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. He shakes his head. His hair is our mother’s, his daughter’s. It’s the only golden thing about him.

“That thing I said. About Gram and regret or whatever.”

“You mean her feeling lost and finally realizing it?”

“Yeah. That.” Troy flicks the cigarette into his mouth and brandishes a flame that licks the tip. He puffs and his cheeks form hollow caves. “I feel it too.”

I nod. I want to sit down and plan out his future, help him save up, get him to the doctor. My stomach bottoms out when I realize I know all the ways to help my brother and can’t even summon one way to help myself.

“I miss her. Maya. And Rosa if you want to know the truth. I’m just...tired. Of being this way, feeling like my heart could stall in a blink. I want to see her.”

“Troy, I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do. You could help me out. I know Rosa probably doesn’t want anything to do with me, but if I can at least see Maya, be there for her, maybe Rosa would give me another chance.” His eyes are cozy, thickly blanketed in delusion. I just nod, knowing if I don’t, he might do what I know he’s capable of. It doesn’t matter that Maya is seventeen and on her way out the door or that Rosa is too smart to fall for someone whose blood courses with booze. What matters is nodding and saying, “I’ll help you” because I love my brother and loving my brother is a lot simpler than letting him down and suffering the consequences. The cat hearts flirt with my mind, but I stave off their advances.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say and stabilize myself for Troy’s inebriated hug. He pushes into me, and I push back to keep from falling off the curb of the sidewalk. We’re dancing in the sunlight, in the parking lot of the Royal Pines apartment complex, in front of a crooked-nosed Prius. My full belly spins, and I wait for my mind to halt and engulf the sound of our shoes scraping against concrete, but it doesn’t. It keeps moving to that horrible night. To the sight of my mother’s eyes confused and questioning as she falls to the ground. I push hard and take him in, swallowing my breath as fast as I can.

“Thank you, Sausage. Thank you!” Troy laughs as we spiral in a sloppy loop. I look up to see Gram spying on us from the window. My grandmother squints then rolls her eyes. The shade snaps back in place, blocking the sun.

I leave Troy in the parking lot with his hand lazily shading his eyes. I want to pretend everything is okay, and I do for the few moments it takes me to pull out of the apartment complex to find a clearing on the side of the road. I pull over, and the traffic passes me by—flashes of color dashing past my shoulders, my shaky hands. I lean over into a ditch lined with weeds I would have mistaken as flowers when I was a little girl and set my stomach free.