Piecing Me Together(12)

“Huh?”

“It’s me, Sam. I’m home. I have a friend with me.” Sam steps in and motions for me to follow her. She whispers, “We have to announce ourselves so she doesn’t think someone is breaking in. She gets freaked out easily.”

I walk behind Sam.

“You can call her Grandma or Mrs. Franklin,” Sam whispers.

“Hello, Mrs. Franklin,” I say.

She is sitting in a worn dark-brown recliner, watching the news. She doesn’t look away from the TV.

“Grandma, my friend said hello. Her name is Jade.”

“Huh?”

“Hello, Mrs. Franklin,” I say again. Louder this time.

Nothing.

Sam shakes her head and calls out, “Grandpa, are you here?”

“In the kitchen!”

“Come on,” Sam says.

I follow her into the kitchen.

Mr. Franklin is standing at the stove, breaking spaghetti over a pot and dumping the noodles into boiling water. He has an apron on. I’ve never seen someone actually wear an apron when they cook. “You must be Jade,” he says to me. He wipes his hands on his apron and holds his right hand out to shake mine. “Sam told me you’d be coming over,” he says.

Sam says, “Next time I’ll go to her house.”

Mr. Franklin asks, “Where do you live, Jade?”

“North Portland.”

“Oh, so not too far from here,” he says. “I haven’t been out that way in a while. Used to have a friend who lived over there by the St. John’s Bridge, near Cathedral Park.”

Mrs. Franklin blurts out, “Nothing but hillbillies, blacks, and Mexicans over there!”

“Grandma!” Sam looks at me and mouths, I’m so sorry.

“Shootouts all the time. That’s okay; let them all kill each other off.”

“Grandma, you can’t say things like that, God!” Sam yells. “And how is it that you can hear us now, but a minute ago—”

“Sam.” Mr. Franklin turns away from the stove and puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder. He looks at me. “We’ve lived here for, oh, about forty years, I think. Yes, forty,” he tells me. “And our neighbors, the ones to our right, they’ve been here for, oh, maybe twenty years.”

“They’re black!” Mrs. Franklin shouts.

I try to imagine what it must feel like to live in one place for so long. I’ve lived in seven places—some houses, some apartments, never a place we owned. Mr. Franklin talks about all the new changes that have happened in Northeast Portland. “I know people say it isn’t what it used to be,” he says. “I’ve been here for it all. I suppose in twenty years, there will be something else coming this way, changing it all again. That’s life,” he says.

I don’t know what to say to Mr. Franklin. I get it, that he’s been here a long time. But I know people who had to move. Mom says it was because the taxes got too high or because they didn’t own their homes in the first place. She says people who don’t own their homes don’t have any real power. I look around Sam’s house. She’s right: it’s small and stuffed and old. But it belongs to them, so that’s something. That’s a whole lot.

“We’re going to be in my room, studying, Grandpa,” Sam says.

We walk through the kitchen to get to the back of the house. “My room is this way.” We turn left at the end of the hall and go into her bedroom. From what I’ve seen, this is the only room in the house that is proof a teenager lives here. The rest of the house looks like a museum of antiques.

Sam has a loft bed with a desk under it. Across from the bed are a small futon and a TV. “Sit wherever you want,” she tells me. “And if you need the bathroom, it’s right there.” She points to a door, and I almost want to go in just to see what it looks like. Her own bathroom? I wish. Sam sits next to me. She takes her shoes off without untying them, and kicks them across the room.

I take my flash cards out of my bag. “Ready?”

“Wow, did you make those? I swear, artists make the simplest things look so good.”

I laugh.

“These actually make me want to study,” Sam says. She reaches for them and flips through them slowly. “Thanks for tutoring me. I need all the help I can get.” Sam gives me back the flash cards.

I hold a card up, showing Sam the English side, and she says the word in Spanish. Then I switch and drill her with the Spanish side. “Now you do me,” I say.

There’s a knock at the door. “Sam, do you have a moment?” Mr. Franklin says.

Sam sighs. “Come in.”

Her grandfather steps into the room, cuffs his cell phone, and says, “It’s your mom.” He steps out of the room but remains in the doorway.

I start going through my flash cards, mostly so I don’t have to sit here and be awkward with Sam’s grandfather, who is definitely listening to every word Sam is saying to her mom.

“School is school,” Sam says. “I’m actually studying right now.”

She is quiet for a while, and then I hear, “No, I haven’t talked to him,” and “Yes, I still have his number,” then, “Well, I have to go. I have company and I’m being rude.” She says good-bye and gives the phone back to her grandfather.