The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek(13)

“Oh right, my first stone,” GamGam said. “I named it Mildred.”

“You named it?”

“I name ’em all! Name ’em after people that did me wrong. But I tell ya, it never matters what I name ’em—they all hurt like the Devil!”

Nope. It didn’t seem brilliant yet.

“I wouldn’t wish stones on my worst enemies,” GamGam continued. “Except maybe Evelyn Barber, the one who spread a rumor that I was a Democrat. All I said was that I thought Bill Clinton was a good-lookin’ man, which is true! He’s what you might call…sexy.” GamGam made a clicking sound with her mouth, her go-to way of accenting anything she considered particularly edgy. “But I’m still a Bush lady all the way.”

“Yep, can’t get too much Bush,” Janine said for her own amusement. “How many people do you know in Bleak Creek who regularly get kidney stones?” She was trying to keep the momentum of the interview going, but it felt like rolling a boulder up a hill.

“Hmm, let’s see,” GamGam said, staring at the popcorn ceiling. “There’s me, there’s Evelyn,”—she rolled her eyes—“Christine Neally, John Reed, Harriet Logan, Ted Yarbrough…” As the list went on, Janine had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She probably would’ve been better off asking GamGam to explain why she found Bill Clinton so sexy.

The idea for this project had come to her less than seventy-two hours earlier, while on the phone with her mom, who’d been worried about GamGam’s recent struggles with gout. “Along with all the kidney stones she’s had,” Janine’s mother had said, “it’s made her doctor concerned about—”

“Wait,” Janine interrupted. “Kidney stones? Plural? I thought it was just the one.”

“No, she’s passed eleven this year alone. We’ve told you this, sweetie.” Janine hadn’t visited Bleak Creek since finishing undergrad, but she was ashamed to think she’d tuned out vital information about her beloved grandmother’s health.

“Eleven in one year? That’s a ridiculous number of kidney stones.”

“Well, it is and isn’t,” her mother said. “For Bleak Creek, that’s not unusual.”

“What the…?”

“I know, right?” Her mom laughed. “Growing up there, I got so used to people passing kidney stones, I didn’t even know it was weird until I left.”

“Yeah. It’s definitely weird, Mom.”

“You remember GamGam’s friend Rose?”

“Nosy Rosy? Of course.”

“She passed thirty-one last year.”

“Thirty-one kidney stones? That’s, like, one every couple weeks!” Janine hadn’t been this curious about anything in months. “What the hell is going on in that town, Mom? Like, seriously!”

And that’s when the idea hit her:

What the hell is going on in that town?

“Oh, you’re making it sound way more dramatic than it is,” Janine’s mother said, chuckling. “It’s still just kidney stones.”

Janine barely heard her, though, as her future documentary’s title dropped into her brain, a gift from the muses after three epic months of creative roadblocks: The Kidney Stoners. A funny yet intriguing doc about her mom’s small southern hometown, a place with a bizarre and unexplained proliferation of kidney stones. This could be her very own Vernon, Florida, the quirky, small-town film from her cinematic hero, Errol Morris. It was perfect. Within twenty-four hours, she and her RCA ProEdit camcorder were on a Continental Airlines flight headed from JFK to Raleigh, ready to make the film that would kickstart her career.

“So, I don’t know,” GamGam concluded. “How many people was that I just named? Maybe forty?”

Janine continued to zone out for a couple seconds before realizing her grandmother had stopped talking. “Yeah, forty sounds right,” she said, having no clue. “Wow. Since kidney stones aren’t, like, contagious, why do you think so many people here get them?”

“I don’t know, Nee—I mean: I don’t know, ma’am.” She winked again. “Guess it’s just something in the water! Dr. Bob says perfectly healthy people can get kidney stones. He’s had a bunch.”

“What does this Dr. Bob say about people passing more than thirty a year?”

“That it’s painful as all get-out!” GamGam laughed. “Woo, boy, kidney stones are not a good time. Did I tell you yesterday what they feel like?”

“You did, yes. In great detail.”

“But did I mention what it’s like as they’re comin’ out of you?”

“Uh—” Janine heard a click on her camera. She’d reached the end of another tape. An act of mercy, really. “We’ll have to get it next time, GamGam.”

“Aw, nelly, I was just gettin’ started!” She’d been speaking for ninety minutes.

As if struck by an epiphany, but the bad kind, Janine suddenly knew:

She’d made a terrible mistake.

Why she had thought talking to older women about their kidney stones would make for a cinematic masterpiece was beyond her. Clearly, it wouldn’t. Even Nosy Rosy, who Janine felt confident would be the linchpin of the whole movie, came up short in her interview last night, clamming up when the camera was aimed at her, offering limp gossip that would barely sustain a public access television show, let alone a critically acclaimed documentary. (“Harriet Logan doesn’t actually have kidney stones,” she’d said, her eyes wide. “It’s just gas.”)