What will I do? Amelia keeps asking me. She’s the only one that seems interested. I tell her that I don’t know, and I don’t. I’m not sure that I can be a college boy. I’m a dropout after all. But the real truth is that I don’t trust myself not to fuck up. I don’t trust myself to do the things I have to do to make it. There’s a lot of shit I’d have to do just to get in. Stuff I have to figure out, fill in, send off. Then there’s school itself. But I do like to read. That I know I can do. So there’s always next summer and what I’m going to find myself doing. Sometimes I get these momentary fantasies where I run off to Mexico with the money and just live on the beach, smoking weed all the time, watching the ocean come in and go out. Maybe I leave my whereabouts for Nacho and Juan and Enrique so they can come kick it with me whenever they want to. In one version, I take Amelia with me. In another one, I tell her she can live in Grams’s house so that she can get away from her stepfather. Lots of stuff crosses my mind, but I stay home every night and stare at the TV that sits on my grams’s writing desk because there’s nowhere to put it.
Tonight, I get this idea. I take the set off the desk and put it on the floor. I face the TV toward the wall and leave it unplugged. I bought this white plastic lawn chair from the grocery store for four bucks and I put it in front of the desk. I sit down. I pull out some typing paper from one of the drawers and I grab a pen from the coffee cup that sits on the top. With Grams dying and my moms and Antony being so far away, and me about to turn seventeen, I’ve been thinking about how things change all the time. I want to write some things down before I forget. People always forget. They forget the most important things. That’s why they spend so much time writing little stupid lists of things they need to do. But I don’t want to forget, and I don’t want to use this paper and pen to write down a list of piddly-assed things I need to do. I want to write about my grams. I want to write about some of the things that I don’t ever want to forget, because Amelia made me realize that night in the Denny’s that to forget something is how you really lose it. Maybe if you protect it, your memory, then no one can steal anything from you.
I’ve been thinking that it might work that way with Antony, even my moms. It works like this: Maybe we’re more than just our experiences. We’re what we learn from those experiences, and what we remember about those experiences, and in that way maybe we can choose what we become, at least a little. Maybe, then, it’s possible I’m more than a fuck-up? What else I am, I don’t know, but it seems like it might be important for me to send Antony these memories, all these stories I’ve got, to let him know that part of him, of who he is, is back here. Because I’m back here and Grams is here. This house is here. A kid should know that. Maybe that’s why I went to California, at least part of the reason: to help him to learn to read and to put a face to them so that when he reads these stories, he won’t have to lose them or me. So I sit there all through the night, threading together what I can, for myself and my brother, and for Grams. And this is what I write:
GRAMS’S PHOTO ALBUM
When she died, besides her house, she left me a five-pound coffee can filled with silver dimes and quarters that she collected all her life. “Silver and gold, that’s always worth something,” she used to say. She was always ready for the next Great Depression. She taught me to be ready for anything.
Living with her when our parents split, I would get stomachaches in the middle of the night, and she would go outside in the dark and pick a few yerba buena leaves and make me a hot tea that always calmed my stomach.
She had a little treasure box that had a tiny padlock that me and Juan were always curious about when we were little kids. She told us that we were not to touch it. One day, while she was at work, we broke it open. Just a bunch of scraps of paper inside. I still wonder what they were, although I understand why she wouldn’t speak to us the rest of the day.
Outside of the living room window, on top of some gray cinder blocks, rested the largest air conditioner in San Antonio. God alone knows how old it was. Dull gray, four feet high, three feet across, it cooled using water. Grams would tell me and Juan to “put water in the ‘fan.’” It had three detachable walls, vented filters made of some sort of absorbent straw. We’d pull them off the unit, lay them on the grass, and turn the hose on them, soaking those vented panels thoroughly. Then we’d turn the hose on the inside of that machine and we’d soak it. Then me and Juan would put those panels back on and race into the living room to turn it on full blast. It always smelled like a rainstorm was coming out of that machine after we wet it down. The air would come streaming out of the vents with little droplets of cold water, smelling so fresh. Grams had a double bed in the living room for me and Juan and it was just within range of that air conditioner. We’d lay there, little kids in little-kid underwear, nice and cool even on a hot South Texas day.
Grams had a garage with a bedroom and small bath attached to it. In the garage and the room were old boxes that she would let me and Juan look around in whenever we wanted. Once we found a couple of straw hats and straw canes, the kind vaudevillians uses. We put on a show for Grams and charged her a dollar to watch.
She made the best apple empanadas I ever tasted. Every Thanksgiving I would watch her make them at my house. She always let me have the first one.
I have a picture of her making tamales. She would take over the kitchen, and Moms and me would spread the masa on the cornstalk leaves. Together with those empanadas, Grams gave us autumn to taste and smell.
I remember her sleeping over one night after Pops had left and I was still living with Moms and you. Grams was moaning in pain. I got up and took her outside, where I told her about the house improvements I wanted to make. I pointed to houses and told her, “I like those shutters. And this is the kind of grass I want to put on the lawn. I like this color to paint the front.” I thought I was the man of the house all of the sudden, and she didn’t step in and tell me I was just a kid. She understood that I wanted to be a man. She wanted me to be one, too. So she stood outside with me, and her pain seemed to go away. Later she claimed that it was calambres, terrible cramps in her legs that had kept her up that night, but I know now that she needed comforting same as me.
She was an acrobatic performer in the carpas, the traveling Mejicano tent shows. She didn’t like to talk about it. It seemed sinful to her now that she was a “Cristiana” and an old woman, too.
At her house she had a small gas heater in each room. It was connected to small gas faucets on the floor. The heater used a blue flame to heat up these ceramic bricks. They worked very well, but I had to be careful getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom because if you rubbed against the heater, you’d give yourself an awful burn. She was like that, too. Comforting, but don’t make her mad.
On my birthdays, when I was a kid, Grams always handed me a penny for every year of my life, and I’d take it to the front of church on Sunday morning and put it in the offering plate, and she’d ask everyone in the church to join in a birthday prayer for me.
Every night, I write one of these memories down. Tonight is my birthday. This last one I put down as a way of letting her know I’m not forgetting and that I know that she’s left me with something once again.
Amelia is coming over to be with me. I don’t know yet if I “love” her. But one thing I do know is that I want her to hear what I’ve written about Grams. She’s the only person who I want listening. I don’t know what that means. Maybe it is love.
She says she’s made me a cake. She even asked me what kind I wanted. I told her chocolate with cream cheese frosting and maraschino cherries on top. She said that was strange, but she made it, anyway.
The day started out alright. I even got a card from my moms. It didn’t say much. Antony wrote his name in it. I won’t go into it. But it was cool to get it.
After a while, I hear Amelia at the door. She’s holding my cake in this big, round plastic deal. She says “Happy birthday!” and she brings in the cake and sets it on the table. I lift the lid and it’s just what I’d imagined. Cream cheese frosting with cherries and in the middle it says “For Robert.”
“I couldn’t fit ‘Happy Birthday’ on it,” she explains. I hug her tight. After we eat, I ask her if she wants to hear what I’ve written. She does, and she actually listens carefully. She tells me that it’s beautiful, and I don’t mind her using that word because it seems right. It describes not what I’ve written so much as it describes my grams and her.
We’re sitting on my bed because there’s no couch in the front and she says, “So how are you feeling now?” I tell her that I’m okay. “I’ve got what I need. At least it feels like it. Everyone took what they wanted, but somehow I still have what I need.” I point at the fan. “Helps me get to sleep, and if I can’t, I go out and write a few things down on the desk in the front. I had this strange dream a couple of nights ago, where I was somewhere else. Just gone, you know, not living here. And I drove by the house and I saw something in the window so I got out of the car and went in. It wasn’t so much scary, but more sad than anything else, the feeling of the dream, that is.
“Grams was sitting on her rocking chair knitting something like she always used to do when I was a kid. So I’m standing there feeling completely confused and guilty at the same time. I say, ‘Grams. I didn’t know you were alive. Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve come back here.’ She looks at me, not creepy like in a horror flick, just calm-like. She says, ‘I was just waiting for you to realize it. I knew you’d come when you were ready. You know I’m never going to die, Robert.’ And I sit down across from her and watch her for a while, just knitting and not really paying much attention to me. But I’m happy because I know it’s alright and that I can go ahead and stay there. Then I woke up, and I didn’t feel scared, the way you usually do when you have a dream about a dead person. It was weird, you know?”
“Maybe that was her telling you something to make you feel better.”
“Comfort me,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “You should write that dream down.”
“Maybe I should.” She puts her arms around me and I settle my head down on her lap. She runs her fingers through my hair and it occurs to me to ask her. “Are you okay? What about your stepfather and your moms?”
She sighs and smiles at the same time and I feel bad for her because I know what’s inside her. I pull her hand from my head for a second and I hold it. I don’t really say anything because there’s nothing really to say. I just want to try and let her know that I’m here with her right now. That this very second, I know how she feels and that she’s not alone. Tonight we are together and we’re safe. You can’t really say that with words and so I just hold her hand.
After a few minutes, she goes back to running her fingers through my hair and I begin to think about what I’m going to do now, and to tell the truth, I’m not really sure. Maybe I’ll do the college thing. Maybe I’ll just work. But I won’t be a burro, and I will be a man. From above my head, I hear Amelia start to sing, not loud, but almost like she’s humming, and I stop thinking about all that shit.
She’s singing so pretty that it doesn’t really matter that I can’t make out the words, because she’s not just singing for me, she’s singing to me. I can feel my body sinking into something I haven’t felt in a long time. I guess you could call it peace. I’d forgotten it, it’s been so long. My eyes close and I feel her fingers on my head, still stroking, making me feel heavy. But I’m not going to go to sleep, not yet. I know now how important it is to stay awake for all this and that I need to listen to every note of her sweet, sad, brief song. Amelia sings and I listen, and the funny thing, the really great thing, is that somewhere in there I stop thinking about tomorrow and find that I’ve let myself slip into the embrace of this day.