Fight Night(49)

Then we found out Grandma couldn’t drive the car with a broken arm! I’m calling Ken, I said. Hold on, hold on, said Grandma. Just hoooooooold your horses, buckeroo. She made her face go small so she could think. After a minute she told me it was probably time that I learned how to drive stick because she had been six years old when she learned and after that had driven to America by herself to deliver a cake and all that. I was trying to be calm and agreeable, instead of lashing out, so I let her teach me. It took a long time to learn. The engine kept stalling. It was really hard. The car was jerking around so much that the radio came on all by itself. Grandma made a joke that we’d be stuck in the parking lot forever just like the old people in the building trying to escape. Somehow that made me learn instantly, and I drove out of the parking lot! I stalled again in the middle of the street. It took four hundred years to move ten feet. The car was jerking so much that suddenly the roof started to come up over us! We couldn’t find the right dial to switch off the radio. It was blasting the best of the 80s so loud that even Grandma could hear it and she sang along but not with the right lyrics. Everything was happening at once. The wipers went on. The roof kept going up and down and up and down. We jerked along, singing and yelling. Grandma told me I was doing a great job! We’re getting there! But she didn’t even really know how to get there or where we were going. She didn’t care. She just thought it was hilarious that somehow we were moving forward at all.

People in other cars were looking at us like we were escaped tigers or something. I stalled again at a red light. Two teenagers got out of a car beside us and came over to ask if we needed help. They asked Grandma if she’d been in a fight and Grandma said you’d better believe it! They laughed and stood around like nothing serious was happening. Grandma asked one of the boys if he knew how to drive stick and he spread his arms wide like are you kidding me? This is the meaning of my life, driving stick. I was born to drive Canadian children and ancient, bruised ladies around without knowing where to. Grandma said she’d give him twenty bucks to drive us back to Ken’s place. I climbed into the little back seat so the teenager could drive. He jumped over the door and landed in a perfect sitting position! Sup! he said. He turned around to fist-bump me. I’m T. I nodded. And you are? he said. S, I said. Awesome! Let’s roll. He fist-bumped Grandma on her good hand. He looked at her sling. He said he’d like to see what the other guy looked like and Grandma laughed and laughed like there was no tomorrow. T told his friends to follow us in their car. He turned the radio to a better station and made the roof stay down. I was jealous of Grandma getting to sit beside him. T and Grandma looked like they were in a commercial and had a useless baby in the back seat always getting in the way of their sexy California dates. Grandma didn’t know how to tell T how to get to Ken’s place. I just feel my way around when I’m in Fresno! she said. I love that! he said. You just feel your way around when you’re in Fresno. I love that. He opened the glove compartment and looked at Ken’s registration. He found Ken’s address. He was careful not to let the glove compartment door bonk Grandma on her knee. He didn’t say uncool shit like okay, ladies, don’t worry about a thing. I know where to go. Leave it to me. He didn’t say anything. He just half-smiled like Lou and made jokes like Grandma. I was dying from how cool he was and how mad I was that Grandma got to sit next to him side by side but life isn’t always fair or easy so dot, dot, dot.

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!