T turned off the radio so he could hear Grandma. She told him she wanted to drive past her sister Irene’s old house, her sister who was Lou and Ken’s mom. Irene once stole silverware from an airplane to give to Grandma as a fancy present when Grandma was a kid and she was the first one in Grandma’s family to wear jeans instead of dresses. She thought everything was funny, especially life. T asked Grandma if she remembered the street name. Grandma said maybe Hazelnut, or Nutberry, or Berrynut, or Maplenut or Lingonberry. We were gonna be feeling our way around Fresno for a long time. Want me to call Ken? I said. No! said Grandma. She was adamantly opposed to calling Ken, because then she’d have to tell him that her arm had become broken and one of her teeth had been knocked out and a teenager named T was driving us around town. Let me think, said Grandma. Juuuuuuuuust give me one little minute to think. T and I were quiet in the sun. We had stopped by the side of the road while Grandma made her face small. Then there was a little explosion. I’ve got it! she said. I remember! Ha! I know exactly where to go. T started driving and Grandma said go here, now here, turn right, okay and up there turn right again, now here, now there, now stop!
We were in front of Irene’s house. It had been her husband’s house too and his name was Benjamin. He’d liked flirting with waitresses and he really liked brown eyes. Irene loved him but also he exasperated her seventy-five percent of the time, which meant even when he was sleeping. We all stared at their house. It was an ordinary house. It had a big window in the front and a palm tree in the yard. Grandma stared and stared. T looked at his phone and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. He had a lot of messages. I looked at my phone. I had one message from Mom trying to use emojis instead of words which she thinks is fun. T probably had a thousand messages from tall California girls in Hollywood asking him to come to their pads to bob around in hot tubs and rub oil on them. Grandma kept staring at her sister’s old house. I heard her sniffling. She was crying! In front of T!
I clamped my teeth together and made my lips go small like a butthole and said Jesus Christ. It sounded like jhzzz kryzzz. I didn’t know what to do to get Grandma to stop crying. If I had a gun I’d just fire an entire magazine into the air. T’s friends were in the car behind us. They were all looking at their phones and making dates with Rihanna and Taylor Swift and ordering jugs and jugs of eucalyptus oil off Amazon Prime. I looked at my phone too. I fake-texted nobody because the only contact in my phone is Mom. Grandma kept staring at the house. I wondered why you would even want to advertise that your town was the world capital of shrivelled up bits of fruit that everybody hates the taste of. Then T looked at Grandma and said hey, you’re sad, that’s okay, that’s cool! Hey, hey, hey. C’mere. He pulled Grandma’s good arm towards him and she flopped against his chest. His chin was on top of her head and he was moving it gently in her white hair. They were hugging! Then T said, Hey S, you too, c’mon dude, group hug! I sort of inched closer to the front seat and then T pulled me closer with one arm and he had his other arm around Grandma and we were all three hugging. It’s hard sometimes, said T. Just super fucking hard, right? He patted our backs. I smelled T’s chest because my face was smashed against it and I had no choice. What if he was a Bulldog? I liked the way his chest smelled. I felt like I was dying from something. What if Grandma and I were hugging a Bulldog? I wondered how to tell Mom everything that had happened. I decided I wouldn’t tell her anything. I’d catch laryngitis on the plane and have it for as long as it took Mom to forget about our trip to California and stop asking questions. Grandma would have to have laryngitis too, but she probably wouldn’t cooperate with that. She wouldn’t be able to not talk for longer than five seconds. If I had laryngitis and she didn’t have laryngitis I wouldn’t even be able to talk louder than her or change the subject every time our trip came up. Also, how was I going to hide Grandma’s broken arm and missing tooth? I would tell Mom just let Grandma be Grandma, the way Grandma talked about Lou. Don’t worry about Grandma’s bones and teeth! Just let her be! So she fell apart slightly in California, that’s her deal, man. Mind your own beeswax! Just go to rehearsal already and forget about it!
Grandma sat back properly in her seat and said hoooooooooo. T moved his chest away from my face and I boomeranged to the back seat really fast so that nobody would think all that hugging had been my idea. Grandma began to laugh. She punched T in the shoulder. Thanks, T! she said. He half-smiled like Lou and said, My pleasure, the pleasure is all mine. He started the car again. Grandma looked back at Irene’s house. She lifted her arm to wave goodbye and then said oh! It was her broken arm. She laughed. How ridiculous! she said. Then she put her head way back so her whole face was under the sun.