“Please just don’t be too hard on him, Lenore,” Lang said. He ran his thumb all the way along Lenore’s leg, making her blink again.
Lang said he sensed everything was going to be all right with respect to Lenore’s great-grandmother, too. He said he just felt it. But he said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
“Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that,” he said. “People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing.”
“I think I ought to grab the opportunity to talk to Rick in private, though, anyway,” Lenore said.
“Uh-huh,” Lang said.
Faint music was coming from the television screen now. Heads kept replacing one another on the screen. Lang had a finger just under the elastic band of Lenore’s panties, on her hip. Lang said the curve of Lenore’s particular hip drove him right straight wild. He kissed her throat again.
Lang said grandmothers made him awfully sad. He said grandmothers were in his opinion basically sad things, especially the really old ones, who had all kinds of sad troubles. He told Lenore he remembered his father’s mother in a nursing home in Texas in the 1960s. He said his grandfather had died and his father and mother had taken the grandmother in, for a time, but that things just hadn’t worked out, even with a sort of nurse hired to come in during the day to look after the grandmother, and that Lang’s father and grandmother had sat down and had a talk and Lang’s father had told her she was going to get moved to a nursing home.
“She was just real decrepit, I remember,” Lang said. “I remember she didn’t move good at all, and her eyes they got milkier and milkier as time went by. She didn’t kick up at the idea of going to the nursing home. I remember she nodded when my Daddy told her. You could tell she knew things just weren’t working out.
“And the thing was we’d visit her in that nursing home every Saturday,” Lang said. “We made it like a routine. My Daddy tried real hard to be a good son. And the place wasn’t but over in Fort Worth, so we’d all just pile in the car and go see her. Always my Daddy, goddamn near always me. Sometimes my mother and my brother. We’d pile in, and drive over, and we’d come through this gate of the place and have to go up this long, real windy gravel road to the place. This was a real nice place, too. It was real expensive. I can’t say anything against the care she must of got.”
Lenore nodded, and Lang touched her lip.
“So we’d just wind on up that road, and I remember how it always looked all sinister up at the actual home itself, which was at the top of a kind of hill, ‘cause my Daddy always had tinted glass in his cars, so when I’d look up at the place through the windshield I’d see all this shit through tinted glass, and it’d look dark as hell, and like it was going to rain and storm and all. It always looked weird,” Lang said. “And we could always see her, as we were coming up that road, ’cause she was always waiting for us on the porch of the place, every time. Place had a real nice porch, raised up. We’d see her as we drove up, see her from far away, ‘cause she had this bright-white hair you could see for miles, and a wheelchair. But and anyway she’d be out there, and we’d come up and pile out, and up we’d go to visit. She was always real glad to see us. It was good to see her, too, but also of course kind of an obligation, you couldn’t deny the fact. I remember I bitched about it, some Saturdays. Had other shit to do. I was like eight.” Lang took his hand off Lenore’s hip and brushed it softly back and forth over her breasts. “But you know we’d visit and all, and she’d fill us in on what she was doing. Which didn’t take much time, ’cause I remember what she was always doing was just making pot holders, for my mother. She made about one pot holder a month, was all. Her hands always moved like it was real cold.”
Lang cleared his throat. “But then after some time went on like that, on one particular Saturday we didn’t go. We couldn’t go that time. My Daddy had some emergency, I had shit to do, so on. So we didn’t go that Saturday. And the next day I remember we couldn’t go that day either. There was just no two ways about it. But Monday we did go, to make up the visit, like surprise her with a visit, to make it up, which seemed fair and all. We all went ahead and piled in that Monday after I got off school. We went, and as we pull up that long drive up the hill we’re confused, ‘cause we can see her, hair all white and wheelchair shining, there on the porch, with everything looking all dark and nasty around her in the tinted glass. And my Daddy goes ’What the hell?‘ ’cause here it was Monday, not Saturday. And it was cool out, you know. It was like November, and things could get cool. But and so she’s sitting there anyway on the porch, in her chair, in blankets, so on.
“And we get up there and get out of the car and go on up to the porch, and she’s glad as hell to see us, like I said her eyes were milky but the milk seemed like it went out of them when she was real happy. She was clapping her hands real slow and soft, and smiling, and trying to hurry to pull pot holders and shit out of the blankets in her lap to show my mother, and grabbing at us and all, and my Daddy says something like ‘Momma it’s Monday, it’s not Saturday, we couldn’t come Saturday so we come today instead to be fair, now you tell me how’d you know to be out here waiting for us today, we didn’t tell anybody we was coming,’ so on. And she looks at my Daddy I remember like she don’t understand, for a time, and then she smiles, real nice, and shrugs, and looks around at us and says well she waits for us every day. Then she nods. Every day, see. She says it like she thought we knew how she waited for us to maybe visit every goddamned day.”
Lenore watched Lang.
“Turned out she didn’t know Saturday from Adam anymore,” Lang said. “She didn’t know we had this shit down to a routine.” He looked out past Lenore. “Or else maybe she did know, but she waited anyway, thinkin’ maybe she’d get lucky and we’d want to see her even on some day when we didn’t have to. Even when it got real cool out on the porch of the place she’d wait, it turned out. She just kept looking at my Daddy like she didn’t see what the problem was, this was just her life, now, here, didn’t we know it? While all the while we just stood around feeling terrible. I remember I felt like shit after that. I was big-time sad.” Lang rubbed at an eye. “She died after that, too, ‘fore I got much older.”
Lenore watched Lang rub one eye. She thought about his grandmother. Lang stopped rubbing his eye and looked at her. Lenore found her throat aching again. She began to cry, just a little bit.
“Now I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Lang said. He smiled kindly. “That’s my sad, it’s not your sad.”
He began kissing at Lenore’s eyes, to get the tears. He did it so gently that Lenore put her arms around his neck. After a minute Lang rolled her toward him and began with one hand to try to unhook the fastener on her bra. Lenore let him, and kept her arms around his neck. Lang played with Lenore’s breasts while she cried and held onto him and thought of a sky in Texas, in November, through tinted glass.
18. 1990
/a/
“Good morning, Patrice.”
“Good morning. How are you this morning?”
“I’m just fine thank you. The nurse tells me you have something for me. ”