“You had a lot going on last night,” Mom says when she comes in from her run the next morning. I’m curled under the afghan on the couch, slurping a bowl of chocolatey cereal and watching one of those really perky morning-show ladies interviewing a puff-haired woman who has a really appealing snaggletooth. “How long have you been up?”
I shrug. “I got up right after you left. Did you know this show is on for, like, three hours every morning? It’s called Good Morning, Sunshine! and they do the local news and weather every ten minutes, and in between they do cooking and fashion shows and interviews. This lady here,” I say, pointing to the snaggletooth, “works for Celebrity! magazine and she’s giving the weekly ‘Hooked Up, Shacked Up, Knocked Up, Broken Up’ update. It’s all about what celebrities are—”
“I get it,” Mom says.
What I don’t say is that I’ve been watching to see if the local news mentions the metal shavings found in Salvation.
Mom sits down next to me on the couch and unties her sneakers. “That host bugs me. Too perky.”
“She’s not so bad,” I say. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but the host’s helmet-head hair and corny jokes are starting to grow on me.
“Were you having nightmares last night?” Mom asks.
I drink the chocolatey milk from the bowl and keep my eyes on the TV. “Nope” I lie. “Why? Was I talking?”
She laughs. “No more than usual. You’ve always been a jabber-jaw in your sleep.”
Then why can’t I ever remember dreaming?
“What’d I say?”
“I don’t remember,” she says, getting up. “I’m going to go stretch and shower.”
“I’m going to watch the news and the weather”—I glance at the clock—“three more times, and in between I’m going to learn how to set a gorgeous Thanksgiving table, improve my credit, and find out if my kids are smoking weed. And then I’m going to school.”
“You might want to get dressed first,” she says on her way upstairs.
Aunt Ruby calls when Mom is in the shower, and I watch the Thanksgiving segment on mute while I talk to her. The cereal’s made me hyper, made me brave.
“Auntie, why are you calling so much all of a sudden?”
“Ask your mama,” she answers.
“I did. She says she doesn’t know.”
“Your mama lies,” she says, stretching out the word “lies.”
I’m speechless for a second. Does the fact that she’s Mom’s sister trump the “nobody talks bad about my mama” rule? I decide that even if it doesn’t, I’ll let it go because I actually like talking to Aunt Ruby.
“So, what are you doing today, Auntie?” I ask.
“Ohhh, nothing, nothing at all. I’m going to set here on the porch, and then I might take a walk after it rains, find some worms, go fishing, and catch dinner in the river.”
“That sounds nice,” I say, turning off the TV. “Did Mom fish when she was a kid?”
“Oh, your mama loved to go fishing,” Aunt Ruby says, laughing. “And when I was a little girl, she’d hold my hand all the way down the river, and put those squirmy worms on the hook for me.”
“Did Aunt Peg come?”
“She did,” Aunt Ruby answers, “but she didn’t fish. She liked to sit and read out loud to us while we fished.”
I can picture them, three little girls in pretty dresses sitting in the sun on the weedy green banks of a river, feet dangling into the water.
“Would you bring snacks?” I ask. Descriptions of food are always my favorite part of a story. I’m wondering if Mom and her sisters brought theirs down to the river in a bucket, like Laura Ingalls Wilder did in the Little House on the Prairie books.
My aunt laughs. “We did, we did, but we carried our snacks in brown paper bags, and since we also carried the worms in brown paper sacks, sometimes your aunt Peg would get confused while she was reading and reach her hand into the bag and get a wiggly, sticky surprise.”
I laugh. “You would switch the bags?”
“Only when she wasn’t looking,” she says, and laughs.
“That’s funny.”
“Oh, it was just silly fun. That was a long time ago.”
“It’s still like that where you live, though, isn’t it? Sort of peaceful and quiet?”
“You have your mama bring you out here so you can see for yourself. You need to meet your people, Dylan.”
“I met you guys,” I say, “when Great-Grandmama died.”
“You call that pit stop a visit? No, you need to come and set at my kitchen table and tell me about your friends while I make you some of my famous fruit salad.”
“Then can we sit on the porch and snap beans?”
She laughs. “Sure we can. I buy my beans at the grocery, but if you want to snap them in half, you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” I say, embarrassed by my front-porch country fantasy. I can’t help it. Mom’s stories about being a little girl sound even better than Little House on the Prairie to me.
“Tell your mama to call her sister,” Aunt Ruby says, and then I’m talking to the dial tone.
“Who was that?” Mom asks, coming back downstairs in her work clothes.
“Who do you think?”
“What’d she say?”
“For you to call her.”
“I bet she did. You should go get changed for school.”
Great-Grandmama was ninety-eight when we went to visit. She was in a nursing home already by then, close to the house my mom grew up in, where Peg and Ruby and my grandma still live. It wasn’t just me and Mom and my dad who came to visit, it was all the Driscolls, from everywhere. Everyone was greats and seconds—great-aunts, great-uncles, second cousins, second cousins twice removed.
We went to the nursing home as soon as we pulled into town, because It was serious, according to Mom and Dad’s whispered conversations in the front seat of the car. Everyone was there already, in Great-Grandmama’s room and spilling out into the hall. My dad carried me at first, in through the front door, and then Mom took me, and I could feel her chest swell, her spine straighten, as we approached the relatives standing outside my great-grandmama’s room. It was the most special I’d ever felt. As we approached, everyone stopped talking, they stopped moving, they just stopped and looked. Since I wasn’t exactly a little Gerber baby, I was totally unused to this reaction. Usually grown-ups shook my hand and made a joke about me looking like the tax collector. But these grown-ups looked into my face and smiled.
As Mom carried me into the room, the crowd around Great-Grandmama’s bed parted, and Mom held me tighter as she stood next to where my great-grandmother lay. I remember thinking, Wow, that is one old lady. A face that made you think of a raisin, or a finger kept in the bathtub too long. But even under the wrinkles, there was the cleft of her chin, there were her wide-set eyes.
The old lady looked at me, and laughed. She had no teeth. I ran my tongue over my own to make sure they were still there.
She kept laughing and laughing and reached up like she wanted to take me, but there was no way I was getting into bed with a raisin lady, so I held on to Mom’s neck as tight as I could, while simultaneously trying to crawl on top of her head. Mom compromised by sitting down on the bed with me. Great-Grandmama just kept giggling, and looking at me, and finally when I was sure Mom wasn’t going to stick me in bed with her and leave me there, I relaxed my grip a little and took a good look at my great-grandmother. She stopped laughing, but kept smiling, and I smiled right back at her. And then she started laughing again, and I did too.
We shared a good laugh, and then she died. I kept laughing, even when everyone else got quiet and one of the more hysterical relatives called for the nurse, and then it wasn’t so cute that I was still laughing, and I got in trouble, but I couldn’t stop. It was just so funny, what she told me with her eyes. I wish I could remember what it was.