She walks out of the deep closet to the stone dog and smiles. “You’re doing a good job,” she says, and hunches over to move him a few inches to the right—But then she is raising, lifting…going from crouched and hovering over the dog to straightening her legs…pulling back her shoulders…lifting her chin…uncurling her spine…every movement noted and frozen in time by a sharp knock at the door.
She instinctively knows. It is not Opal. But who? No one knows she is here.
Except Mama.
The knock comes again, hard, demanding attention.
But Mama’s knock would not be so forceful. It would be slurred, undecided, barely there. Barely interested.
It is not Mama.
The knock comes again. Impatient.
She walks to the door, forcing a smile, ready to say hello, ready to see how it feels to answer her door. She turns the knob and swings the door wide.
Gray eyes pierce her own, and a hand lifts up, casting a flapping shadow like a bird across her face. The hand comes back down before she can twist away, and the black shadow becomes a white explosion across Zoe’s ear and eye. She winces and presses the side of her head but keeps her eyes on the gray ones holding her own.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Grandma—”
“Don’t say a word, missy! You hear me? You just listen!”
“But, Gra—”
“You leave a note? You leave a note taped to the TV?” Her words come out strained, like tight cords ready to snap. “You know what that did to your mama? What she’s been doing all day long? Crying! You hear that? Crying! Crying her eyes out for a hard, ungrateful daughter!”
Zoe stares hard at Grandma. She wants Grandma to look into her face. I’m not invisible. Just look. That’s all.
But instead Zoe sees the saliva gathering at the corners of Grandma’s mouth, working up into silvery threads that slide into the creases of her mouth because Grandma will not swallow, will not take the time to lick the corners with her tongue, because she has too much to say and no time at all to search Zoe’s face.
“Your mama’s had enough heartache without you adding to it! Who do you think—”
“Grandma!” Zoe hardly recognizes her own voice. It is loud and desperate and stops the wrinkled lips midsentence. “Grandma,” she says again, but she can’t go farther. Zoe looks away, examining the doorjamb, picking at the creamy paint with her fingernail, afraid, as the words finally run out of her mouth to a place where she can never take them back. “I can’t. I can’t watch anymore.” But they are still not the words she wanted. Her brain has sidestepped.
Grandma’s head tilts to the side, her voice lowers and each word comes out distinctly separate like she is afraid, too. “Can’t watch what?”
“I can’t watch Mama…die.”
“What?” Fear explodes in Grandma’s eyes at the suggestion of losing her favorite child. Her upper lip lifts and freezes unnaturally, exposing yellowed teeth anchored in receding gums. “What are you saying?”
“Mama’s dying, Grandma. It’s the alcohol. Mama’s…an alcoholic.” There. She said it. It’s done. And it doesn’t sound silly or impossible. It sounds true.
Grandma shakes her head and sighs. Her voice softens. “Beth, Beth.” Zoe listens carefully to her middle name said softly, almost tenderly. Grandma reaches out and momentarily cups Zoe’s chin. “Now, Beth, that’s a fool notion you’ve gotten hold of—probably in one of your classes at school. A few drinks don’t make someone an alcoholic.”
“But, Grandma—”
“Now you hear me out. I ain’t denying your mama tips it a little often, but she’s going through a hard time right now. That’s all. Just a hard time. What with your daddy—” Grandma raises her eyebrows and sighs again. “Well, with him passing on—especially the way it happened—well, like I said, she’s just going through a hard time. This’ll pass. But in the meantime she needs her family to be sticking close by her.”
As Grandma continues to speak she opens her purse and shakes out a cigarette from a nearly empty pack. She lights it, pulls hard, and blows smoke out through one side of her sagging mouth. “You don’t get over something like this overnight, and your daddy, well, he was the love of your mama’s life, so that’s—”
“Love of her life? She threw him out, Grandma. That’s why he was at the motel in the first place.”
Grandma smirks, and smoke drifts out her nose. “I know how it looks, but that was nothing. Lovers have quarrels all the time. It wasn’t their first, and no one guessed it would be their last, but that doesn’t change how she felt about him. She was crazy about that man,” and then under her breath as she always had to do when talking about Daddy, she added, “though only the Lord knows why.”
Zoe feels the wound of Grandma’s familiar comment fresh each time. She is half of Daddy. Half of Daddy stands before Grandma right now. His dark eyes, dark hair, and maybe more. But there is no sense, Zoe thinks, in digging open old wounds, when fresh ones lie before them. And Grandma
has to at least hold to the logic of time. “But, Grandma, it’s been almost two years since Daddy died, and even long before that Mama and Daddy were drinking—”