Grams’s funeral is a sham. My pops rearranged the whole thing. He bought her an expensive copper coffin, not the cheap wooden one she wanted. She never was fancy about anything. I know everyone says that funerals are for the living, but as far as I’m concerned, they should be a little bit about the dead, too. Anyway, Grams was living when she told me about how she wanted her funeral.
That fucking funeral director was there, too, but when he saw my pops coming, he knew he had a big sale on his hands. I went with him mostly because I didn’t want this kind of thing to happen. I wanted to jump in there if any funny business started to go down, but when that weasel started suggesting all this fancy shit to my pops, I didn’t stand a chance. Pops spent a ton. Everything that lying thief rattled off, my pops was ready to sign off on. After a while, I was so sick I couldn’t even listen anymore. I tried just once to keep Pops and that weasel director honest. I said, “Pops, you really think Grams would’ve wanted all this?” Before I could say anything else, that dude jumped in with his smooth voice, all oiled up in this fake-assed, soothing timbre. He said, “Oh, it will look wonderful. Such peace for the bereaved to see that their beloved is lying in comfort. It’s your final chance to show how much you love her and how much she will be missed.” He had my pops hook, line, and sinker. My grams would have looked that funeral guy in the eye and told him to go screw himself, although she wouldn’t have used the word screw. But she would’ve meant it in just that way, and that weasel would have known that she meant it in just that way.
* * *
I haven’t gone back to Grams’s house. I can’t do it. It’s too dark. It’s filled with pain, and not just mine. Grams didn’t go in a way that I can feel good about. She went alone and hurting. It was too terrible and no matter who tells me what, I won’t believe it. I won’t give in to some punk fantasy about her going with a smile on her face and heaven in her heart. Nobody should go the way she did, drugged up so that she can’t even tell what time it is; so that she doesn’t even know where she is. Confused and alone. How fucked up is that? I’m not going back there to that house right now, and when I go to the funeral, I’m not going to bow my head and pray thanks to God for taking her. I’m not going to get up there and sing some phony song about sheep and shepherds and angels and clouds. No sweet by-and-by. If they ask me to say something, they’ll be sorry because I’ll tell them that Grams wouldn’t have liked the way they set this thing up and I’ll tell them that she never really liked them and that they never really knew her and that they left her alone too much and I’ll tell them that I was an asshole to her and left her alone when I could’ve been there to help her and keep her company. I’ll tell them how fucking rotten I feel, how my stomach bleeds for her now, and not for my own self-pitying bullshit. I’ll tell them all that, and then I’ll tell them that all I want to do is apologize, but not to them. To her. Only I can’t and I’ll never be able to. That I should’ve done it that day when she told me those things in her bedroom while I peeled an orange for her. I’ll tell them that I wish it was true that I was chosen for something better than I am right now, than I’ve become, a little, punk-assed, snaggle-toothed vampire that creeps around trying to find ways of causing trouble. I’ll tell them that my biggest fear is that Grams was just telling me that stuff because she wanted to feel some amount of hope or peace about me. That I was a disappointment to her and that she had to concoct some story about King David just so that she could die without going crazy with worry about me.
But they won’t call me.
* * *
The funeral is at my uncle’s church. Since I’ve been staying with him and Enrique, I drive there with them. When we get to the church, there are a lot of people already, old people I’ve never seen before, gray figures from my grams’s past, a past that precedes me, that I don’t have a clue about. It’s a big church, rectangular, with dozens of heavy wooden pews divided in the middle by an aisle that leads up to the pulpit, which sits on a slightly raised platform. My grams’s casket lies on a table. From the back of the church I can see the warm hue of the copper, its half-lid propped open. I can make out what looks like my grams’s forehead, a shock of white hair brushed back. I stand back there. I don’t want to walk any closer to the front.
So instead of moving, I scan the front pews looking for my old man. I see him hunched over, his head in his hands, transfixed by the sight of the copper coffin, probably looking at that shock of white hair and that pale forehead, too. Just then, one of my father’s cousins comes back to get me. “Go to your father. He needs you.” She leads me to the front pew and I sit next to my old man. I feel nauseated, my ulcer making my stomach roll around so that it feels like I’m on a damned boat at sea instead of in this church. I can’t say good-bye to her here, not like this. My pops looks miserable but I can’t reach over to him. He doesn’t really seem to need me, anyway. His girlfriend is next to him and she’s holding both his hands now, rubbing them hard through her black cotton gloves. From behind, one of my grams’s old friends, some woman that I don’t know at all, reaches over and puts her hand on my shoulder. “M’ijito,” she starts out, her voice shaky and ready to bust a wail on me, “she love you very much, She look so peaceful. Have you gone up to see her?” I want her to take her mothball-smelling arm away from me. I want to give her hand a rap and tell her to leave me the fuck alone. How come she’s alive? She’s old, too, older than my grams ever was. But she’s alive! Her breathing is an affront because by being old she both reminds me of my grams and yet is so grotesquely not my grams.
Finally, the service starts. After a musical number, where some old-timers get up on stage and play an instrumental, my uncle starts to preach. It’s not a eulogy. He doesn’t really talk about Grams as a person. Instead, he begins talking about death and why it happens and what it all means. He gets me there, my attention, that is.
“This woman, my father’s sister, and my great-aunt, many will say, went in a horrible, painful way. They’ll seize upon that to say that God is not good. That God is indifferent to our pain, to our fates. Perhaps they will even say worse. That God causes our pain and that thus God cannot be good, but that the case is that He is the very opposite of good. That He is evil.
“I want to tell you that this is not so. I want to tell you that our pain and our death, our misfortune, mean just as much, if not more, than our joy and our triumphs. Do you know why? Because they reveal a plan, a system, a story, that God is writing. It is a story that has been written to tell us of our frailty. It tells us of the brevity of life, of this earthly paradise, or rather what we humans often cling to as if it were a paradise.
“We are here only a minute, and for that minute, we experience a pain that is in reality a deeper longing for something that we are lacking, and which nothing, not even life itself, can fill. Too often, we cling to earthly love and delight for the wrong reasons—we think that love and delight will satiate the hunger we feel so deeply inside. Think on this, brethren: Earthly love and earthly pain are linked in our hearts because they have the same cause. They point to the same lack. Rosita Lomos no longer lacks. She no longer hungers. She is no longer thirsty.” The people are all listening now, some of them beginning to say “Amen” and others to say “Hallelujah.” It distracts and annoys me. I’m trying to listen.
“She has finally learned, in the language of the spirit—the language that God speaks—what it is that was at the root of her pain, and I’ll tell you that it was not ‘cancer.’
“If we listen with still spirits, with humble hearts, with a quiet that allows us to hear the whispering of the Spirit, we shall perhaps be able to make out the sound of God’s answer. Listen!” And then he lowers his voice. “Your pain has been that interminable distance put there by the cares of the world, by that which you have loved so much that it separated you from Me: life itself.” He gets louder. “Come to Me now, God has told Rosita Lomos, come to Me now and be filled with a love that spells not longing nor absence. Be filled by My fullness, My Being. Rosita Lomos heard that call and has been brought out of the desert, the Desert of Life, the Desert of Pain, the Desert which brings us to God.”
I look over and my pops is crying. He has heard and believed. My uncle has spoken and everyone in the church seems to be seeing my grams’s body in that copper coffin as the final paragraph in some eternal, universal, holy story.
Everyone except me. I don’t feel it. I don’t see it. All I feel and see is a pain tied straight to my grams and how much I miss her, not to anything else. I’m no David. I’m not chosen. Not even my grams, the best person I’ve ever known, seems chosen, even with my uncle’s sermon still playing in my head. I can’t believe any of it, although for a minute there, I wish I could more than anything else, because then Grams would be right, and all this would mean something more than it does. I could march right out of here, find that asshole Nacho, and tell him that his agnostic theory and pot-head philosophy are all wrong. That he better watch it. Then I could chill, feel peace. A peace that would let me think out my “purpose,” the one Grams talked to me about.
The rest of the funeral is a blur, a long, terrible, blue blur. I wish that I would’ve brought Amelia, but I told her not to come. I told her that I didn’t want her to skip out of school, but the real reason was that I didn’t want her to see me all choked up and crazy. I didn’t want her to see all the holy rollers so up-close and personal. To tell the truth, I was afraid that it would grab me and take me along and I didn’t want her to see me like that. But as they’re lowering Grams into the ground, I can’t help but wish that Amelia was here. That somebody could be here just for me. I wouldn’t have needed her to keep me from passing out or even for her to give me a shoulder to cry on. It would’ve been enough that someone next to me knew that I was feeling as empty as an old paper bag.
When she’s in the ground and this thing finally breaks up, Pops asks me to ride back with him and his girlfriend to Grams’s house. The “close” relatives are getting together there to eat and talk about Grams. A family memorial, my pops calls it. I tell him that I’ll be there in a minute, after I pick up Amelia. I figure if I bring a girl into the equation, Pops will understand. He does, although I can tell he wishes I’d roll with him. I feel bad about that, at least for a second, but then I think about all those damned relatives sitting on my grams’s couch and on her chair, using her bathroom, putting their grubby hands on her fridge and sink, and I can’t do it.
I don’t go anywhere near Amelia’s. Instead, I just drive around till I get the bright idea of going by the job site. As I drive into the parking lot, though, I can’t bear to do that either. I don’t want to see those assholes right now. I don’t want any company. I don’t even want to be with myself, but that’s a tough order. I have a joint in my ashtray and as I sit in the parking lot, I smoke it till I feel a buzz creeping in. It isn’t much of a solution to how I’m feeling, I know that, but it’s the only option I feel up to choosing. After a while, some of the guys start to filter out of the building. It’s quitting time and I split before anyone sees me.
I drive past Grams’s, not because I have any intention of getting out, but just because. Just because I feel like driving down that familiar street, and seeing that familiar house, and being close to about the only comfort I’ve had but now’ve lost forever. The yard is filled with strange cars and on the porch I see a couple of shit cousins, young punks. I drive by slowly, but they don’t notice me. They’re just kids, playing around. They don’t know nothing about anything. I drive off to find a hotel.
* * *
I hole up at the Motel 6, my home away from home. It dawns on me that I could star in a fucking commercial for them. “Got nowhere to go, got not much moola? Are you a lonely, pathetic, forlorn loser? There’s always room at the Six, the deep Six. Tell ’em Robert sent you.” I smile at the camera with my chiseled vampire teeth.
Two days later, I finally call Amelia. She’s been worried, but she’s cool. She doesn’t sweat me. Instead she asks me how I’m feeling and how I’ve been doing. I feel bad about that. “Why don’t I pick you up?” I say. She’s all for it. “We have to be careful though. Well, I do, anyway. My stepfather found out I’m still seeing you, and he gave my mother a real bad time about it.”
“How bad?”
“Bad.” And I know that she’s not bullshitting.
“I’ll pick you up at the library.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work anymore.”
“Well, where then?”
“I’ll have to sneak out. You’ll have to wait till three o’clock in the morning, when everyone’s asleep. Can you do that?”
I pick her up at the usual spot, just around the corner. I recognize her shape, walking slow, her small limp becoming more pronounced as she gets closer to my car. She gets in and she smiles, her brown eyes so welcome. She reaches over and hugs me and for a minute, I shit you not, I feel like I’m going to just put my head on her shoulder and either start bawling or fall asleep, but I resist and instead, I give her a little kiss and say, “You hungry?”
She nods. “Sure.”
“Where?”
“Denny’s?” I point the car in that direction.
Once we’re at the restaurant, she wants to know about the funeral. I tell her about how phony the whole thing was and how I didn’t stop at Grams’s house afterward. “Why didn’t you go in?” she asks me.
“I just didn’t want to be around them,” I say.
“Who, your father? Why not?”
“No, I mean yes, that’s part of it. But that’s not all of it. It’s hard to explain, but I knew what they’d be doing. They’d be sitting around talking about her, telling each other stories and shit like that. I didn’t want to hear that stuff. Not from them.”
“What’s wrong with them telling stories? It’d be because they loved your grandmother, too,” Amelia says. She’s not being stubborn, I can tell that. She’s just trying to figure out why I’m being so bad about this. I know it doesn’t really make sense, but I want to explain it to her. To myself.
“I don’t want them to act like they had a piece of her, like she belonged to them. She didn’t at all. She didn’t even like them.”
“Not even your father?”
“She loved my father. I don’t know if she liked him much.”
“I wish I would’ve been there.” She says it like she means it.
“Why?” I ask her.
“Because I didn’t really know her at all. Just the once that I met her and that’s it. I would’ve liked to have known a lot more about her. I would’ve wanted to hear those stories.”
“Why?” I ask again. “You don’t even know your own grandmother that well. Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because she was so important to you, Robert.”
“Oh,” I say because that catches me by surprise, that this girl could want to know a dead woman just because she meant something to me.
“Why don’t you tell me something about her, a story, anyway.”
I think about it for a second. “I could tell you one right now,” I say. “One that wouldn’t make me too damned sad, though.”
“A happy one then,” she says. “Not at all sentimental.” So I think about it, and the perfect one comes to mind right there in a Denny’s of all places.
I’d been faking being sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school. I hated going to school. My moms told my grams and so she took me to go see a shoe cobbler one day. She told me she had to drop off some shoes to be fixed, you know, just an errand. I was only six so I was just along for the ride as far as I knew. It was just some little shop where the guy probably lived, right there in the neighborhood. The shop was shabby and plain, with an unvarnished floor made out of old dull wood. There were two or three chairs with his workbench in the middle of the room. He was an old guy, and when we walked in, he said hello to my grams by first name, “Rosita,” he said, a few crooked teeth poking from his wrinkly brown lips. I could tell he was a nice old coot offering his hospitality to my grams. “Got some shoes for you today, Lencho.” She held out a pair of old-lady shoes for him to take. He grabbed them, happy-like, a regular businessman. He walked immediately to his bench and began to reheel my grams’s gray shoes. “This boy, he looks like a good boy,” he said as he tap-tapped with his little hammer, like some elf from a fairy story. “Oh, he’s okay, but he’s gonna be a burro.” The old man stopped tapping for a second to peer over at me with a serious look. “You don’t wanta be no burro, boy.” He started tapping again, but kept talking, too. “I’m a burro.” I looked over at my grams because I wanted to crack up at the old man who’d just called himself a burro, but she was listening to Lencho and so I stifled the laugh and looked back at him. “Yeah, I never wanted to go to school. My momma, she needed me to work anyway, so she didn’t care if I stopped going to school. Now all I do is fix these shoes, when I get shoes.” Then Grams started talking to him. She pretended to ignore me like I wasn’t even there. “I’m a burra, too, Lencho. I have to clean houses for those old, rich, white ladies over on the north side of town.” She shook her head slowly. “’magine that. Me, an old lady, cleaning houses for ladies the same age.” Lencho brought over the shoes that he’d just reheeled. “Look at us,” he said, looking at me, “a couple of burros, and you with the chance to go to school.” He shook his head sadly, like I’d disappointed him in a big way. “He’s gonna be a burro, too,” Grams said matter-of-factly, “I know it. That’s what he wants, all the time pretending to be sick, coming home crying early from school because he don’t like it.” The two burros looked at me so sad-like. Grams gave him a couple of bucks and he took it and put it in his apron. The cool part was that just as we hit the door, I heard the old guy go “Heeehaaaw!” just like a burro. I still faked being sick the next day, but I knew that I wouldn’t be a burro. That always stayed in my head. Always. My grams was always good that way.
I look over at Amelia, and that crazy girl is wiping away a tear. “That wasn’t supposed to be a sad story,” I say. “Why are you crying?”
She’s staring right at me and she says, “Why are you crying?” and just like that, she wipes a goddamn tear away from my eye. And that’s the way I say good-bye to Grams.
* * *
My grams’s relatives found a way of saying good-bye to her, too. They’ve stolen all her stuff. After a week or so, I finally decide that I gotta go back to Grams’s house. At least to check on it. The house is locked up, but inside it’s empty so that it’s like when Grams left, everything left with her. I’m confused for a second. “Maybe I walked into the wrong house,” I keep thinking as I walk from room to room. In the front, everything is gone except for her writing desk. They’ve even taken her portrait. They left the TV because it’s a piece of shit. I guess the desk was too heavy. My room is still together, but the kitchen table, the chairs, even Grams’s bed is gone. In her room, only the old metal fan is there. They probably thought it was broken. I look in her closet. Her clothes are still there. So are her shoes. Who would want old-lady shoes? They also left my old encyclopedia set and a few books I’d put in my room. A 1946 Britannica isn’t very useful, I guess. Grams’s secret closet is empty, too. All the pictures and my granpa’s funeral flag, the one that was folded military style and given to Grams—gone.
It’s not that much of a shock really. Grams always told me that people would take everything when she died. Her warning plays in my head, “They’ll come quick with a truck or two and they’ll clean my house out. You better get what you want first. That’s what they did to the old man who lives across the street. His body not even in the ground, and I seen ’em, people who hardly even spoke to that viejito, taking his furniture.” Even dead, Grams is still getting it right. And it almost makes me happy to have her prediction come through, her wisdom proving right one more time. Could it be possible that if she was this right about those vultures, that she might’ve been right about me being chosen?
The phone rings. It’s my pops. “Where have you been?” he asks me, pissed off. “You just disappeared.” It’s ironic: him telling me that I disappeared. I’m about to tell him that when he tells me he’s going back to California. “I won’t be back for a few months, so you’re going to have to watch that house.”
“Too late,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“Motherfuckers already took everything, just like the Grinch.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he says. “I told people at the wake that they could take mementos if they wanted.”
“What? You did what? Did you forget I live here?” I say. “Did you forget that me and Grams lived here and that she wouldn’t have wanted those motherfuckers taking all her stuff?” He’s about to go off on me, but before he can do it, I hang up. It doesn’t really matter. I mean it does, because I don’t have a chair for my ass, or a pot to piss in. But I know that it’s not really that that’s bothering me. It’s that the stuff I was counting on to remember her is gone. The light spots that jump from the empty walls where pictures hung are the exclamation marks to her dying. But that’s what I get for being a punk and staying away. If I’d been here, I would’ve worn out my sneaks on anyone’s ass, including my pops, who tried to walk off with my grams’s stuff. She tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.
I head off for True Value and buy some new locks and put them on the front and back doors. The little girls next door are watching me do it. “What are you doing, Robert?” Tina asks me.
“Changing the locks.”
“Why? Because they stole your stuff?” I put the screwdriver down and walk to the fence.
“Did you see people taking stuff from here?” They both nod big, eyes wide open.
“Yup, we sure did,” says Ruthie. “We told ’em, ‘what are you doing?’”
“They didn’t listen,” says Tina.
“Yeah, well, thanks for trying,” I say. “They should’ve known better. But I’m making sure they can’t get in anymore.”
“Didn’t they already take everything?” asks Ruthie.
“They haven’t taken the house,” I say. “I’m not going to let them do that.” I’m not, either.
Two days later, I get a letter from some small-time Mexican lawyer named Ray Candelaria. He writes that he put together my grams’s will, and that I should contact him soon. His office isn’t very far. He’s strictly a westside chiseler, with an office full of people who are getting fucked by some monster because they can’t afford car insurance or because they got fired by some jerk-off middle-manager who thinks all Mexicans steal or are lazy, or because they got hurt on the job and now they’re getting screwed.
Candelaria’s secretary tells me to wait, but I don’t have to wait that long. The lawyer, this short, dark man with white hair and a cheap suit, is sitting behind a desk. “Sit down, Mr. Lomos. Sit down.” I do. “I don’t have a lot of time, but we can settle this fairly quickly. Your grandmother has made some provisions for you in her will. Basically, she’s left you everything: her car, her house, her savings account, and her insurance policies. She was quite a hard worker. But I’m sure you know that. The savings account has almost eleven thousand dollars in it, and the insurance policies are worth just over twenty-five thousand.” I don’t say anything. “There are some conditions, though. First, you can’t touch the savings until you turn eighteen, and your grandmother wanted me to read you this note. ‘Roberto, you use this money to go to college. That is what it’s for. But if you decide to be a burro, you use it for your kid’s college. Live in this house, make it your home. Always be the good man that you are and remember I love you. Your Grams.’ Now, according to this document, you aren’t yet quite seventeen.”
“No,” I say. “A few days.”
“Very well. I’ll probate the will. Your grandmother already paid for my services. You should be receiving checks from the insurance companies very soon. I advise that you put them in a savings account as soon as you get them. It seems like a lot, but it’s not really. It’s a nice little sum. If you take care of it, you’ll find that it can help you through college. Where are you thinking of going?” I scan the wall above his head. His law degree is from St. Mary’s University.
“St. Mary’s,” I say.
He smiles. “Very good. A very solid place. What is it you want to do?”
I have no idea but I say the first thing that comes to mind: “Be a lawyer.”
“I don’t need the competition,” he says, laughing a little bit fakey. “Maybe you can come work for me. Your grandmother said you were a bright boy.”
“She did? When did she come to you?”
“Oh,” he says, looking at his file, “just about four months ago.”
“Did she know she was sick?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe she suspected, but I don’t remember talking about her health. She did tell me that you were smart and that she’d been saving a long time for you to go to college.” I thank the guy and I walk out in a daze. Four months ago I’d been in California playing the fool. Grams had known it all along, that all that shit with Moms would blow up, and that I’d come back. She’d had a backup for me. A plan she thought would work. A plan she must’ve thought I could see through. I get in my Mustang and drive back to her house, my house. I stand on the front yard and look at it. It looks different to me. Nobody can kick me out. My grams made sure of that. I don’t have to run anywhere, because I’d only be running away from myself, from my home. But maybe that’s always been the case, and I feel Grams’s death deeper and harder than the day she died. The next day I go back to work. Brace and Phil are already putting up ceiling tiles. When Brace sees me, he gives me the hold-up sign. He hustles down the scaffold, almost falling on his ass. “Sum’bitch,” he says grabbing on to a pile of tiles to keep from splitting his forehead. “You don’t work here anymore.”
“What?”
“Yeah, man. Nothing personal. P.J.’s laying everybody off. Only me and Phil working now. The summer’s almost over. Remember, ‘shit labor’? Don’t feel bad, kid. You don’t belong here anyway. Your grandmother just died. You should take it easy right now.” I just nod. “You can pick up your last check from the office. If you got nothing else going on next summer, I’m sure P.J.’ll hire you back then. Take’r easy.” He scrambles back up the scaffold, only he’s more careful this time.
Next summer? There will be a next summer. What will I be doing next summer? It hits me. I don’t belong here, and not just because my grams died. Fuck if I’ll be here next summer. I might not be a college boy, but I’m not going to be washing fiberglass from underneath my balls this time next year, that’s for sure.
I go to Target and buy some cheap pans with that nonstick surface on them so that I can burn stuff without worrying too much about it. I gotta learn to cook something besides French onion soup. I gotta learn to do a lot of things.