It was our joke—something I called her because I couldn’t say my w’s when I was a toddler. My pawpaw always called her “woman” when he referred to her, a habit I picked up, quite adorably.
“Well, sugar, you made it,” Gran said with pleasure, turning her faded hazel eyes on me. She wore a sparkly blouse and some polyester pants she’d probably bought in 1984. She looked like home to me. “Welcome home. I know it was hard coming here.”
And with those words, my jaunt to Mooringsport had just become worth it. “Hey, I got you something.”
I handed her a gift that contained the hand-painted porcelain earrings I had found at Printemps the first day I worked there. They were almost identical to the ones I had lost when I was eight years old and had meddled in my grandmother’s jewelry box when I had been forbidden to play with her few good pieces. My grandfather had bought her the earrings in Mexico on an anniversary trip, and she’d been heartbroken when I had lost one in the backyard playing “house.”
“You didn’t have to get me a present!” she exclaimed, looking pleased anyway.
Aunt Jean set her coffee down. “Go on and get you somethin’ to eat, Roo. Jimbo and Ed Earl have cooked enough for Coxey’s army.”
My mother finally noted me. She wore a too-tight T-shirt with a country and western band emblazoned across the top, ripped jeans, and boots that weren’t doing her back any favors. Her hair was dyed black, with a wing of sapphire blue swooping back from her forehead, and she was pretty for a woman in her late forties, though hardship pinched her mouth, and too much sun marred her skin. She arched an eyebrow. “Thought you was too good for us and all.”
Conversation sort of fell off, and everyone turned their gazes on me crouched beside Gran. All except the multitude of children throwing the football and skipping rope in the side yard. They continued whooping, grunting, and bickering, as children did when unsupervised.
“It’s Gran’s birthday,” I said.
“Well, you didn’t show up on my birthday,” my mother said, crossing her legs and taking another drink of whatever was in her faux Yeti tumbler. Probably straight-up vodka.
“You noticed, huh? Surprising,” I said, turning my focus back on Gran. I wasn’t going to indulge my mother, who loved to draw attention to herself. That’s why she’d stayed a cocktail waitress when she could have worked at a dozen other jobs. She liked the low-cut blouses, the flirting, and making my daddy jealous. The fights they had made us quite popular in the neighborhood, as they usually brought the sheriff and everyone outside in their robes to watch my mother sobbing and my daddy in cuffs. Good times.
My mother sighed heavily and opened her mouth to say something more, but Gran held up a finger. “It’s my birthday, Leta. Let’s be nice to each other.”
My mother snapped her mouth closed and rolled her eyes.
Gran distracted everyone by lifting my gift, and it seemed to work, because all eyes went to the small package in her hands. My grandmother took her time, sliding the tape loose with her long nails. She carefully folded the flowered paper as if she might use it again and shimmied the box open. “Oh, lookee here. These are just like the ones your pap got me in Cancún!”
“I felt like I owed you these,” I said, grateful for my grandmother for so much, though most recently for getting my mother’s attention off me. “I found them in the store where I work.”
“You didn’t owe me a thing, but I love them. I’m wearing them to church tomorrow.” Gran carefully put the lid on the box and leaned over to plop a kiss on my cheek. She smelled like coffee and Estée Lauder, and I was sucked back to my childhood in an instant. I closed my eyes briefly and pretended that the water under the bridges I had burned wasn’t so raging.
At that moment Ed Earl wandered over. “Hey there, Roo.”
I glanced up and gave him a frosty look before looking back at Gran and Aunt Jean. I wasn’t talking to him.
“Go on now, Ed Earl,” Gran said, shooting him a warning glance. “You got burgers to grill.”
“I want to talk to Ruby Lynn. We have some things to say,” my uncle insisted, jabbing the spatula in his hand in my direction.
Ed Earl was the meanest of my gran’s five kids. She sometimes joked that she’d dropped him on his head more than a few times as a child, and it hadn’t made him stupid—it had made him mad, and it had stuck. There had been many a time that Gran had said she was done with him, but the woman couldn’t help herself from letting him back into the fold. She loved him in spite of his shortcomings and illegal doings, especially since he’d given her three grandbabies to love. My three male cousins were apples that had not dropped far from the tree, but a grandmother’s love was shade enough for rotten fruit.