We Are the Ants(11)

“That’s irrelevant.”

“I’ve got two children, Mother, I don’t need a third.”

“I would rather die than live in one of those places.”

They glared at each other across the table. The air between them a toxic cloud of cigarette smoke and resentment. I was certain they’d forgotten I was there, and the intelligent decision would have been to sneak away, but I was thinking with my rumbling stomach rather than my brain.

“Nana doesn’t belong in a nursing home, Mom.”

“Mind your own business, Henry.”

Nana stood and shuffled to the fridge. “Go to your room and wait for your father to get home.” She lingered before the open doors, staring at the shelves of food.

“Daddy’s gone,” Mom said, her fight evaporating. “He’s been dead a long time.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Nana mumbled. “I think he’d like pot roast for supper.”

Nana’s forgetfulness was cute at first—she’d call us by the wrong names, mix up our birthdays, send us Christmas cards in the middle of summer—but it isn’t cute anymore. Sometimes she looks at me, and I see nothing but a deepening abyss where my grandmother used to be. She’s becoming a stranger to me, and I’m often nobody to her. Then she’ll turn around ten minutes later and tell me I’m her favorite grandson. Nana’s doctors believe her memory will continue to deteriorate. Good days outnumber the bad now, but eventu-ally only bad days will remain.

“I’ll come home right after school,” I said. “Don’t put her in a home.”

Nana unloaded butter, tomatoes, and a package of chicken thighs onto the table. Whatever she was cooking, it wasn’t pot roast.

Mom fumbled with her cigarettes and lit another. “What-ever. It’s not like we can afford it anyway, especially with the way you and your brother eat.” She glanced at the shoe box of unpaid bills. “Waiting tables isn’t exactly the path to riches.”

“Get a new job then,” I said. “You studied cooking in France. You should be running a restaurant.”

“Henry—”

“Come on, Mom. You know I’m right. I bet there are tons of restaurants that would hire you. If you’d just try to—”

“Henry,” she said. “Shut up.”

Charlie and his girlfriend, Zooey Hawthorne, barged into the kitchen, carrying grocery bags, oblivious to the tension that clung to the walls like splattered grease. I never thought I’d be glad to see Charlie.

“Who’s hungry?” he asked, dropping his bags onto the table, which pushed Nana’s growing collection of odd ingredients aside. “Zooey’s making pasta carbonara, and I thought Nana could bake an apple pie.”

Zooey kissed Nana’s cheek and led her away from the fridge. “You have to give me your recipe. It’s so yum.” Zooey is taller than Charlie, slender, with skin like a buckeye, and spacey brown eyes. Way too good for my dipshit brother.

I was still waiting for Mom to pick up our argument from where we left off, while Charlie and Zooey unpacked groceries like we were some kind of happy family. Like this was normal.

“I’ll skip the food poisoning tonight,” I said.

Charlie grabbed my arm, squeezing hard, and pulled me into an awkward hug. It threw me off-balance. Charlie doesn’t hug me—we don’t hug each other—it isn’t our thing. Wedgies, wet willies, dead legs, and broken noses—those are our things. “Family dinner, bro.”

Mom shook her head. Her shoulders were slumped and her back bowed, giving her the impression of having a hump. “Charlie, I don’t think tonight—”

“We’re pregnant.”

Zooey and Charlie snapped together, linking hands and sharing a goofy grin. She rubbed her still-flat belly and said, “Ten weeks. I wasn’t sure at first, even after I took a dozen home tests, but I went to my gyno and she confirmed it and . . . we’re pregnant!”

“I told Mom to have you neutered,” I said, and Charlie boxed my ear.

“Show some respect, kid.”

“Kid?” My brother is a kid. Sure, he can drink, smoke, and kill during wartimes, but he’s still a dumb kid. He pees on the toilet seat and doesn’t know how to operate the washing machine, and it was only a couple of months ago that he shoved a peanut M&M so far up his nose that we had to take him to the emergency room to have it extracted. Charlie has no business having a baby when he’s just a baby himself.

But Charlie and Zooey stood in the middle of the kitchen, smiling and smiling, waiting for someone to congratulate them or tell them they were ruining their lives. The longer they waited, the more strained their smiles became, cracking around the edges. They might have waited forever if Nana hadn’t broken the silence.

“Young man, do your parents know you’re having a colored girl’s baby?”

“Nana!” I said, mortified by what she’d said but laughing at her the way you’d laugh at a toddler screaming “f*ck!” in the middle of a crowded department store.

Charlie and Zooey latched on to Nana’s anachronistic racism and wrung out a chuckle that turned into a torrent of laughter. We were so busy being mortified by what Nana had said and uncomfortable at our own response that we didn’t notice Mom crying until she said, “Oh, Charlie.”