DOTTY ON THE LINE

So how’s that junk sculpture coming along?” Mom asked me while I was pretending to be hungry for dinner that night. “You’ve been working so hard on it lately.”

I told her the sculpture was going okay, which was true, but meanwhile I was also trying to erase the last five hours from my brain. I don’t know about you, but my mother’s like a mind reader that way. It’s safer if you just don’t think about the stuff you don’t want her to know.

And that wasn’t easy, because I still had about a hundred questions I wanted to ask.

Finally, after dinner, I decided to take a chance—not with Mom but with Grandma. I waited until Mom and Georgia were upstairs watching a movie, and then I found Grandma in the living room, fixing up the couch for me the way she did every night.

“Grandma?” I said. I kept my voice down, just in case.

“Yeah, kiddo?”

“You know that picture of Mom with my dad? The one of them in front of Hairy’s Place?”

“Sure. I love that picture,” she said.

“Well, I was just curious. Do you know who Hairy is? I mean, not that it really matters or anything,” I said.

“Oh, he’s your father’s uncle,” she said, just like that. “Not a very nice man, though.” Then she went back to tucking my blankets in under the cushions.

It hit me like a punch in the stomach. That big, hairy—scary—guy was my great-uncle? It seemed kind of impossible, even though it wasn’t impossible at all.

“Grandma?” I said again.

“Yeah, kiddo?”

“Do you know what his real name is?”

“Whose name, sweetie?” she said. Sometimes talking to Grandma is a little like a bad phone connection.

“Hairy,” I said. “The guy with the barbershop. The one in the old picture?”

Grandma got this big smile on her face. “You know, that reminds me,” she said. “Have I ever shown you my old photos before? We should dig them out sometime and take a little walk down memory lane.”

Well, what was I going to say to that? Besides, it wasn’t like going back to square one. I already knew more than I did before I talked to her.

“Sure,” I told her. “That sounds good.”

She dropped a couple of pillows onto the couch and then crunched me up in one of those surprisingly strong hugs of hers.

“I love you, Ralphie,” she said. “You’re a good boy.”

“I love you too, Grandma,” I said.

And that was the truth too.