by Jack Gantos
I couldn’t stand lying in bed and thinking about my family anymore so I got up and went into the kitchen. While the water boiled, I cut up apples into little matchstick-sized strips. Grandma liked apples because they kept her regular, and I liked cutting them up because it gave me something to do.
After I poured the water into the teapot, I could hear the hissing noise of her oxygen hose. Sometimes the breathing tube slipped off her nose when she slept, or she just removed it and set it aside while she smoked another cigarette.
I set the breakfast tray on a TV table outside her curtain like I had done for weeks. “Grandma,” I called out, “time to get up.”
I just heard the hissing.
“Grand—maaaa!” I hollered.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes and reached for the edge of the curtain. My hand was suddenly shaking and so was my voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced to Pablo and Pablita, who had come out looking for food, “I give you the one, the only, Grandma Pigza! The woman whose brain has been surgically replaced with a crystal ball!” I whipped the shower curtain back and gasped when I opened my eyes. She was sitting there on the couch all dressed up in one of her old blue-ribbon dresses that was made from a print of summer flowers. But her body was in a different season. She looked like a dried-up sunflower inside that dress with her thin neck bent forward and her chin dug into her chest. Even her drooping shoulders looked like fall leaves that had lost their color. “Grandma!” I whispered nervously. “Wake up.” I bent over to one side so I could look up into her face. It was so still. I turned her oxygen tank off. Then I reached for her hand. It felt odd, not cold, just heavy. “Grandma?” I whispered again. “Grandma?”
She didn’t answer and I already knew why. “Look,” I said, “wake up. I’m taking my patch off my arm.” I ripped it off. “And I’m putting it on your arm. It’s a fresh one and that should wind your clock.”
That didn’t work and I was getting scared like when you know something has gone bad and you can’t do anything to stop it. So I ran back into my room and slapped two patches onto my arm because it was definitely going to be a two-patch day.
Then I got a little mirror from the bathroom and held it under her nose. She didn’t fog it up. I put that down and tried to check her pulse, but I couldn’t feel anything. I got a flashlight and lifted a soft eyelid, which was slumped down against the bottom of her eye like a flat tire.
“Grandma,” I whispered, “if you are a zombie, what is the cure to bring you back to life?”
But she didn’t stomp or scratch or wiggle. She didn’t get back to me. Finally I lit one of her cigarettes and took a puff and blew the smoke in her face, and she didn’t perk up or snatch the cigarette out of my hand or backslap me for smoking. Then I knew she was dead.
Her clock had stopped and even though I didn’t want my clock to stop, I did want to slow time for a while. I wanted us to be alone before anyone came over and ruined the quiet time we had left together. The first thing I did was lay her back down on the couch because I knew she was going to get stiff soon like bodies do in the movies and I didn’t want her to fall off the couch and hit the floor and look as if I didn’t care. “You can rest now,” I said as I straightened out her thin legs and pulled up her socks so that they were the same height on both sides, and I adjusted her slippers so her bony feet looked comfortable. I knew enough to fold her hands across her lap. Then I tugged on the hem of her dress to smooth out the wrinkles and once I did that I sat there and stared down at her. It’s true what they say that when someone you love dies, you only remember the good things about them. Whatever hurtful things she had ever said or done all vanished, and I felt as if I had lost the one person who understood me better than anyone else. We were alike. And that’s why she wanted me to move on in the world, so I wouldn’t end up dying on a couch behind a shower curtain in someone else’s house.
I took a good look at her. She was gray, and the dress she wore was so old, as if she too were something slowly fading away. I went into Mom’s room and got her bright red nail polish and some lipstick and makeup. When I returned, I pulled up a chair and began to fix her up the same way I had watched Mom fix her up when they would have a little day of beauty.
I rubbed lipstick on my finger, then ran it over her lips until her smile took on some shape. Then I dusted her cheeks and nose with powder so she whitened up a bit, but not so much that she looked like a marble statue. I brushed her short hair forward as best I could and with my fingers evened out her bangs. The longer hairs on the side of her head I tucked behind her ears. I leaned down and examined her earlobes. They were pierced but empty. I went into Mom’s room and found a pair of small silver studs. When I returned to Grandma, I pushed the studs through the holes. I couldn’t find the backs to hold them in place, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere.
When I began to paint her fingernails, I started remembering so much about her. Maybe it was because I was holding her hand again after having spent so much of my life with her hand grabbing on to me. Even though we were both wired when it was just the two of us in the old days, I had more energy than she did, and when she wanted to take a nap or at night when she was tired, she sometimes would tie our hands together with one of dad’s neckties, or a scarf, or old belt so I couldn’t run off. Sometimes I’d keep scissors in my pocket so I could cut myself free and sneak away, until I made too much noise, and then she’d tie us up again. I remember her hands holding cards from one time when our heat was turned off from not paying the bill, and we went across to the Mini Mart and hung out for the night. Grandma made a fake campfire out of those paper logs they sell, and we sat cross-legged on either side and drank strawberry Yoo-Hoos and ate marshmallows we stuck on drink straws and pretended were roasted while we played a thousand games of crazy eights until it was light outside and we could go shopping in heated stores until we ended up in some downtown office waiting forever until she got our heat turned back on. And when I held her ring finger, I remembered when we went to a jeweler and she sold her little diamond wedding band so we could get some cash because she was trying to keep things going while Mom and Dad were so busy chasing around they forgot about us. I just wished her hands would come back to life and grip me again like they used to. I wouldn’t care if she grabbed me by the back of my shirt and swung me around until I was so dizzy I fell down and curled up into a ball and gave her five minutes of peace. Or if she poked me or squeezed me or slapped at me or jerked my arm so hard I thought I’d lose it, like when you jerk a baseball bat out of a rack. Now, her hands were no longer around to tell me what to do, and it was my hands that had to hold hers.
When I finished her nails I held her wrists and waved them back and forth so they would dry. And then I remembered something I had done that made me feel so bad all over again. When I had left Dad’s house in Pittsburgh last summer, the last thing I saw was Grandma standing on his porch waving at me, and even though at first I thought she was waving goodbye, she told me when she came back to our house by bus a few weeks later that she was waving so we would turn around and rescue her too. I always felt bad about that, especially when she said she thought I loved Pablo more than I loved her. I told her it had nothing to do with love, that we were just too scared Dad was going to get us, and so we left in a hurry. But although her feelings were hurt, she came back to help me even though I didn’t know I still needed her help. She knew Mom and Dad were not finished with each other, and it was up to her to get me out of this crazy house so I could have a chance to be somebody besides Carter and Fran’s wired-up kid.
“I’m so glad you came back, Grandma,” I whispered. By the time I finished saying that, I was unable to see with all the tears in my eyes. I leaned forward and wiped them on her bony shoulder, and I kept my face pressed there because I knew my final time with her was over.
When I sat up, I tried to take care of the business she left behind. I looked in her cigar box to see if there was any jewelry I could put
on her. There were a few hairpins and a Girl Scout badge for gardening and some plastic kid’s rings and clip-on flowers. There was also an address book. I opened it up. Listed inside were a few scratched-out names and nothing more. She had no friends. None. And now I knew why she wanted me to make friends. She wanted me to have what she couldn’t.
She had stuck an envelope between the cushions of the couch as if she had raised a white flag and given up. The envelope had been marked “Lung Transplant.” She had crossed that out and written “For Joey P. Pigza.” The P stands for Petunia. That was her pet name for me when I was a baby, and so she always used P for my middle initial. For some reason Mom didn’t give me a middle name. She was going to name me after Carter but they were having an argument about what to call me, and so she just gave me the first name. Once Grandma decided I didn’t always smell like a petunia, she called me Piglet. Then I grew some and she called me Popeye. For a while she called me the Pope, Popsicle, Pit Stop, Putz, Pizza, Purple, and Pluto, and when I was driving her nuts, she called me Joey Problem Pigza. Once she said it stood for Paul—my twin brother. She said, “You had both been put up for adoption, and he had been taken in by a nice family, but no one would take you so we had to keep you. Somewhere out there in a really nice house, with nice parents and an especially nice grandma, lives a little boy named Paul J. Pigza, who is treated like a prince. If you ever meet him, ask what the J stands for.” I called all three Pigzas in the phone book and there wasn’t one with a middle name of Joey. After about a week Grandma told me she was just pulling my leg. I think she would have allowed me to go on believing that I had a twin brother except that she wanted to see my reaction when she told me I didn’t. That was her idea of a good joke. It took me a while to laugh, but I did eventually because I realized that if I did have a great twin, Grandma would have kept him, and that would have to be me. So I was the great one after all.
I opened the envelope. There was three hundred dollars in cash, six scratch card winners that added up to fifty bucks, and two pieces of folded paper. On one she had written on the outside MY LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. I flipped it open. Everything goes to Joey, she had written. Nothing goes to them. It was signed and dated one week ago. She knew she was going to go. She was just waiting for me to make a friend. I opened the other. Joey, it read, after you read this call Galt’s Funeral Parlor. They’ll take care of me. I already talked with them and paid in advance. I’ll be cremated, and put in a jar for you and Pablo. And then she had added just in the last few days, and Pablita. Love, Grandma. PS: Look out for number seven. She must have known her death was bad thing number six. Now I had to look out for one more. What could be worse than this?
Just then there was a knock on what was left of our front door and I nearly jumped to the ceiling. Pablo and Pablita began barking furiously.
When I opened the door, I saw it was the little old lady with the ice cream.
“Sorry I’m a few days late,” she said sweetly.
“Believe me,” I replied, “it’s better this way.”
“Did you know there is a turkey on your front porch?” she asked. “I think some rodents got to it.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said. She held out a plastic container of ice cream. “For the dogs,” she said. “Charro wanted me to say thank you again.”
I took it. “I’d invite you in,” I said. “But my grandma is having a bad day, and the house is a bit of a mess, and nobody is here but me and Pablo and Pablita, and so it’s just not a good time.”
“Oh,” she replied. “Do you need some help?”
“No,” I said. “It’s okay. My grandma left instructions on what to do.”
Talking to her seemed to settle me down a bit, and after she left, I got started cleaning up. I took a big trash bag out front and slid the gnawed-on turkey inside. I imagined the little gnomes from down the street had discovered it and spent the evening on my porch chopping at the turkey meat with their little hatchets and slurping up the stuff on the steps. They were probably stuffed and sleeping it off under some bushes. I walked down the steps and threw everything I could in the bag—bowls, spoons, forks, plates, pie tins. Everything. Then I dragged the bag out back to the trash can. I pulled the hose around front and sprayed off the steps and a little bit of the porch where I could without getting water inside the house because of the busted door. When I finished that, I returned inside and called the funeral parlor.
“She’s on the couch. The door’s open. You can just come and get her,” I said to the man who said he had spoken to her. “And there’s some homemade ice cream in the freezer. Help yourself.”
“Will you be there?” he asked. “There are some papers to sign.”
“No,” I said. “I have to go tell my mom. And I’ll tell her to stop by and sign.”
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of her from here, and we’ll set the viewing for Sunday.”
“Thanks,” I said, then thought to add, “Be gentle with her. She’s had a pretty rough life.”
“We’ll treat her like royalty,” he said. “She’ll be in good hands.”
When I got off the phone I went over to Grandma. I peeled a second patch off and stuck it on her shoulder, up under her sleeve, next to the other one. “This is so you don’t get too nervous at the pearly gates and give Saint Peter an earful,” I said. “Remember, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Then I locked the dogs in my bedroom with the turkey jerky and went to tell Mom.
When I walked into the hair salon she was doing six girls at once. I stood and watched for a minute. There was a wedding about to take place, and Mom was brushing out hair and pinning up hair and spraying hair, and all the girls were putting on purple satin gowns and squeezing their feet into shoes that were tight and tall, and Booth was there snapping rolls of pictures, and when I realized they would never slow down I just inched right up to Mom and said, “I have something big to tell you.”
“Well, it better be an apology.” she said, sounding just as irritated as when I last saw her. Then she combed her fingers through some girl’s hair and teased it back and forth until the girl’s neck about snapped off.
“It’s not about Dad,” I said.
“I’m still very annoyed that you spoke to him about me.”
“I was just trying to help him feel a little better,” I said.
“Well, that’s no help to me.”
“Or me,” I said. “I’m the one who’s stuck in the middle.”
“Well, you are going to have to choose—me or him,” she said, turning toward me. “So what is your choice?”
“Can I get back—”
Mom reached forward and covered my mouth with her open hand. “I hate it when you say that!” she snapped. “It really sends me around the bend.”
I bit down on the inside of her palm, and she jerked it away. “Okay,” I said, “I won’t say it.”
“You’re driving me crazy,” she huffed, rubbing her hands together.
“Mom,” I said, “I came here to tell you that Grandma died.”
Everyone seemed to stop as if we were playing freeze tag.
“I had a feeling something like this would happen,” Mom said, lowering her brush and sighing. She seemed more frustrated than sad. “The minute I try to get ahead, something always goes wrong.” She began to pull little brown clouds of hair out of the brush and drop them on the floor.
“Don’t worry. I already called the funeral parlor,” I said, not wanting to ruin her day. “The viewing is Sunday. You have to go over there and sign some papers. I’ve taken care of everything else, and now I’m going to go find Dad.”
“Fran,” Booth said, lowering his camera, “why don’t you go with Joey?”
She began to brush another girl’s hair. “I’m pretty busy here,” she said. “I’ll see him tonight. Besides, there’s nothing I can do now anyway.”
“Go on,” Booth said calmly. “We’re about set anyway
. The girls look fine.”
“I still have the bride to style,” Mom said. “Joey can deal with his dad. There’s no telling what I’d do to the man if I saw him.”
“Then just spend some time with Joey,” he coaxed. “Come on.”
“Booth,” Mom said harshly, “this is one of those times when you are not family and should mind your own business.”
Booth dropped his gaze down into the viewfinder of his camera and took a shot of his own feet.
“I was just trying to help,” I said. “Is that so wrong?”
“I’ll tell you what would be a help to me—don’t ever mention that man’s name around me again. That would be a real help.”
“Would that make you happy?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t hurt my chances of ever smiling again,” she replied.
Suddenly Booth raised his camera to his eye. “Smile,” he called to Mom. She glared over at him, and he snapped her picture. I knew she had dots in her eyes from the flash, so I just darted out the front door. By the time she could see, she’d find I was out of sight, and I figured that would make her happy.
It only took me a few minutes to make my way up to the stockyards. And a few more to find Dad’s little shack. I peeked in the window again. This time he wasn’t surrounded by yapping Chihuahuas. I tapped on the wood over the window. When he rolled over, I could hear the sound of bottles clinking against each other.
“Dad,” I called out. “It’s me, Joey.”
