Grady Boykins peered through the aluminum slats of a venetian blind, looking out at the street from Donnie’s second-story bedroom window. There, across the street and three doors down, his grandmother ambled through scrub and red dust interrogating the sides of their house—pinched brow and ruminating lips, disobeying doctors, caustic radiation falling mercilessly from the sky, temperatures in triple-digits. She had no business being outside. The matriarch craned her neck up and down scrutinizing the aging tongue-and-groove siding, frowning closely at the new botheration: the house exterior blanched and cracking. Wood was decayed and rotten. Knot holes allowed who knows what creatures to live in the walls. Grady had heard scrabbling feet in the night.
One hand angled backward on her lumbar as if to counterweight her ample bosom, the other supporting her tiny spectacles aloft from their moorings, like a night-gowned, beslippered, 90-year-old building inspector. A tank of oxygen on wheels clattered along beside her, a clear tube nestled in her nostrils and draped over her ears. Her hair mimicked a mad scientist, her jaw shot out in a grim underbite of deliberation, an expression that announced the germination of a grand project, the charter of which began with Grady’s name.
That frowsy look had been a regular occurrence in his thirteen years. Her body language was unmistakable, perhaps intentionally so as a woman who had learned the power of including all her upper body in the freight of an idea that she would meticulously unfold, most likely over pork fritters and lima beans that evening. He read the signs: her reckless outdoor excursion would soon precipitate her broaching this matter of the peeling paint in a ponderous manner, and she would unburden herself, over the porcine fricassee, of a grave concern, the results of which would entail his being tasked with the urgent duty of a) power-washing the house in preparation for b) patching and repairing the decrepit structure, to be followed by c) a repainting that would occupy much of the remaining summer.
He snapped the blinds shut. It was the hour of dusk at which all children of small Texas towns instinctively know as dinnertime. Grady lingered in Donnie’s bedroom idolizing his near complete collection of Silver Surfer comics, each in a plastic sleeve.
“You can borrow my 1978 if you want,” said Donnie. “I have to have it back tomorrow though.”
“The Ultimate Cosmic Experience. So cool.”
“Hey I need to wash up for dinner.”
“Maybe I could just sit here in your room while you eat—”
Suddenly the two boys heard, as did all the neighborhood, the nicotine-tempered, abandoned voice of Sylvia Boykins, Grady’s mother, calling out his name from their doorstep, lusty, turbid, as if summoning hogs, hands cupped to her mouth, like Gabriel on judgment day. There was no avoiding it. He knew she would stand there hollering in lipstick, high heels and sequined miniskirt, interrupting every household’s dinner within three blocks in every direction, until he returned. The Macquaries across the street would glance at each other, Mr. Macquarie pausing, his fork in mid-air. Dogs under porches would look on with distressed brows. It grated him since she knew exactly where he was anyway.
When he drew up his chair to the kitchen table, Bertie lifted her chin from her plate and gripped her knife like a stiletto.
“Finally we can eat! Momma, you look so beautiful! Grady, didn’t I make Momma look beautiful?”
“Thank you, darlin’. Momma’s going out tonight, so you have to bathe yourself, you hear? You can do that, can’t you? Grady can help if you need anything.”
Sylvia stood over the table and forked out pear slices out of the can onto each plate. She wore three costume necklaces, dazzling earrings, and jewelry on all fingers, all picked out by Bertie. On hearing of Sylvia’s plans, Bertie made a fretted pout.
Grandma, sitting at the head of the table, sucked her teeth significantly until the praeludium was finished. As she always did at mealtime, she hung the oxygen tube on the back of the chair. When the others began eating, she sat with her palms spread flat on the table, punctuating her speech with pauses to catch her breath.
“Let us all thank your…mother for dinner. Sylvia, a regular feast. Now. Grady, my child…” All were made mute with plugs of pork. “You are soon to…enter the society of…adults. This is no…small thing. There’s something in…a man’s constitution…the male psyche. He craves…respect, he craves it like the…air he breathes, a longing in his soul. Men are…hunters. They must conquer. A man feels he must make his way in the…world, establish himself as an…actor in…life’s great stage play.”
Grady ate in silence. He knew if he gave any suggestion of resistance, this speech would end, he would be branded the disrespectful, impudent coward, his actual admission to the privileges of adulthood would be cruelly delayed, and he would still have to paint the house, but as a punishment instead of a heroic deed, and under the frown of grandma who would blindly dismiss even his best work as slipshod.
“So when I say that I have…a certain task that I would…like you to undertake…” He steadfastly looked into a void space in her general direction, appearing to pay attention but avoiding the sorcery of eye contact. “Your poor mother and little…sister—this house is all they have. You are…the man of the house by necessity. And it falls to you to…take up the…mantle of chivalry. I have no doubt…it has…come to your attention—the…masculine eye notices such things that the…exterior of this house is in an…increasing state of…degradation.”
She went on to describe in tediously prolonged detail the peril of accelerated decay that comes to unpainted wood, the woebegone state that the women under his care would suffer, and the infamy that would accrue to his name if multiple layers of the finest acrylic were not forthwith procured and applied, symbolic of the carapace of protection his manly presence graced upon his poor abandoned mother and sister.
“And so, Grady Larraine Boykins. Have no regrets for the…loss of summer leisure. Though you are young, you are not the…first to have adulthood thrust upon you early. Those who depend on you…can wait no longer.”
The next morning, with Sylvia still in bed, grandma woke Grady at 7:30 and made sure he had a hardy breakfast, directing him to fetch the iron skillet and ingredients so she could fry bacon and scramble three eggs for him. As he scrubbed the dishes, she sat and explained that she would drive him to get supplies for painting in her truck, a 1982 Chevy C10. Bertie came into the kitchen in pajamas and tousled hair and poured herself a bowl of Froot Loops, listening to the plans. Then Grady helped Grandma to the driver’s seat of the truck, hefting her oxygen into the bed, lighting her cigarette with the dashboard lighter, and finding the key on the keyring.
Grandma drove with absolute confidence despite jumping the curb a couple of times and running a red light. Grady didn’t dare help her steer when she drifted outside the lines, he just coughed extra loud to wake her up. They got a 5-gallon bucket of white exterior paint with brushes and masking tape at Western Allied Paint, and they rented an extension ladder and a power washer from Cody’s Feed and Supply. Cody showed him how to set the choke and prime the carburetor, and it took every ounce of Grady’s strength to pull the starter cord hard enough to waken the machine. When they got home, Grady helped his trembling grandma to her bed.
Operating the power washer, that shotgun-like wand that sent a high-pressure jet at the squeeze of a trigger, was like scratching an itch he never knew he had. It would even have almost been fun were it not for the debilitating summer heat. The dirt ran down in streams; the house already looked better. He blasted nests of mud daubers lodged under the soffits and blew off flakes of old paint in misty waves that showered down and dotted the ground. His sneakers were quickly soaked along with the lower flares of his blue jeans. By midday the fun was spent. He gazed at Donnie’s bedroom window knowing he was up there, comfortable, reading comics.
The day wore on. His arms ached and trembled to hold the nozzle, which was now like supporting a relentless rocket. His ears rang with the raucous drone of the engine. At the end of the day his fingertips were wrinkled. Not a dry stitch of clothing remained. The spray created humidity that compounded his misery.
That evening he went to bed early, too tired to eat, to talk, to dream, too body-sore to sleepwalk. He expected to sleep without moving until daylight shone in his face. But sometime after midnight he awoke to a cry somewhere across the house, not the normal pouting cry of a seven-year-old girl, but a hollowed-out kind of moaning, the ghostly kind that raises a shock of fear and adrenaline.
The sound ejected him from his bed onto the floor. Sleep flowed thickly in his blood and he struggled like a drunkard across his room. Ghostly shafts of moonlight cut across his path at angles that deceived his sense of the horizontal, compounding his vertigo and sent him tumbling into walls and kicking chairs and side tables.
“Bertie—”
In the seconds of wakefulness and panic, he found his way to the living room window where Bertie stood under a mournful moon ray. His chemical balance was restored and he sat before her to look into her face. Her eyes were open, unseeing.
“Bertie! What are you doing up? Where’s mom?”
“Didn’t you see her?”
“What? Where? No, I didn’t…”
“Yes you did. You saw. She’s dead.”
They were outside of Sylvia’s bedroom. The door was open. He scuttled to his feet and went into the room. The bed was empty, the pale closet light was on. Some seconds of panic ensued as he turned on lights, checked the closet, and the bathroom. She was still out, probably at a bar, probably in a stranger’s bed, probably planning to sneak back in the house in the pre-dawn darkness before anyone woke up.
Grady came back and found Bertie in a shadowy corner of the living room sobbing. As he was about to pick her up, he felt that her pajama bottoms were soaking wet. He closed his eyes.
“Shit. Damn it, Mom.”
He considered for a moment getting Grandma up. She always removed her hearing aids and had no doubt slept through the whole commotion. He found a freshly folded towel on a pile on the sofa and helped Bertie remove her sodden pajamas and wrapped the towel around her. When he wrapped one arm around her back and gently swept her legs out with the other, she naturally collapsed on his neck and fell silent. He carried her back to her room. With her restored to sleep, he sized up her bed; no, the two of them wouldn’t fit. Then he brought his pillow and lay next to her on the floor with his arms folded across his chest. Sleep fought him for some minutes. Troubled images of his mother cluttered his thoughts: that embarrassing outfit, her ways, her solitary desperation. He imagined what it would be like to say something tomorrow, to tell her about Bertie’s nightmare, but no. The only thing worse than her pathetic lifestyle was the contrived, dramatic apologies, the promises broken before they left her lips, her clammy hands outreached begging a hug as if that would reconcile. Her stale breath.
The next morning, Grandma had Cream of Wheat ready when he appeared in the kitchen, and a stack of buttered toast and a pot of coffee. Bertie was curled up in a blanket in front of the TV as he pulled on his cap heading out the door. He wondered if she remembered anything from last night; neither one spoke. Mother’s bedroom door was closed.
Donnie appeared mid-morning as Grady organized paint rollers and masking tape in the garage. In two hands like a sacred epistle, he held the 1978 Silver Surfer enclosed in an immaculate plastic sleeve. They exchanged chin jerks.
“Are you up for The Ultimate Cosmic Experience?”
“You kiddin’? You’re looking at it.”
“Yeah? I don’t see no surfboard.” He handed him the comic book and looked around with a kind of bewilderment at paint brushes, rollers, extension poles, masking tape, 5-gallon buckets of paint. “I’ll let you check it out of my library. Mom says I have to get it back from you tomorrow.”
Grady was prying open a can of spackling. “Cool, thanks man. I’ll take a look tonight if I can keep my eyes open.”
Donnie set the comic on the workbench and dove his hands in his pockets. “You’re painting?”
“I’m being the shit n’ biscuits Man of the House. Hopefully it will turn into a car on my sixteenth birthday.”
A couple of days into the prep work, grandmother appeared outside, panting in her nightgown and slippers, laboring to walk around the house, dragging her oxygen cart. From her sleeve she produced a telescoping pointing device that resembled a ballpoint pen, and she jerkily stretched it out and began pointing out spots requiring his special attention. She paused frequently to breathe, her jaw cocked askew.
The heat blazed up with intensity that morning, and Grady had stripped to his undershirt. He watched grandmother’s face when she went silent, frowning deeply in distraction, mulling some sensation in her chest, looking as if she tasted vomit. Then she gripped his arm.
“Help me inside.”
Four weeks into the project, he was hitting his snooze button three and four times. One morning when he arrived a little late at the breakfast table his mother was filling out a job application for a nail salon and having a breakfast beer. She paused her writing occasionally to toss a pretzel in her mouth. Bertie had pulled a chair up very close to her and intently watched everything her mother did, leaning in and looking like she had something to say, searching to make conversation.
“Where’s grandma?”
“Haven’t seen her.”
He would have to make his own breakfast today.
“I like that pen, momma,” Bertie said. “Can I keep it when you’re done?”
“You want it that bad? It’s just a pen.”
“Momma, if you get this job will you do my nails sometime?”
“We’ll see honey.”
The prep work was nearly finished. Fixing countless sections of rotten trim, patching holes with putty, and applying a layer of primer took far more time than the actual painting.
The initial bitterness he felt after the novelty wore off had now turned into a sense of his daily employment, a routine that he worked on every day not because of his grandmother’s vaunted commissioning, but because it was the thing he did now, as unthinkingly necessary as a job that he had gone to as long as he could remember. In the mornings he often dressed in the silence of the house—jeans with smears of paint, work boots flecked with white, one of several ruined tee-shirts, and a ball cap. Evenings he could not keep awake past nine. He seldom turned in his bed at night. Only on days when the hot wind kicked up dust and would have ruined the paint did he turn to a little indoor touching up. On those days he gave Bertie’s bedroom a fresh coat.
Sylvia started her new job and Bertie’s days became a sequence of restless activities performed like an orphan driven by some internal hunger. In the mornings she rode around the driveway and street on a little pink bicycle, the last thing her father had given her, with plastic white frills streaming from the handlebars and a Wild Fire decal on the frame. Up the street and back, up the street and back, never too far, in the corner of Grady’s eye as he sweltered at the top of the ladder. Then during the day, alone with grandma in the house, Bertie dressed and undressed her dolls, wrangled an oversized book on her lap, or spread peanut butter on crackers while watching the old cuckoo clock for momma’s return.
Grandma began to stay in bed except when her desperate impatience with physical frailty caused her to get up and try to make cookies or horse around with the ironing board. When the panic of breathlessness, vertigo, and nausea became too acute she laid down on the nearest flat surface unable to move, and Bertie came silently beside her fanning her face and holding her hand.
Thursday of her first week at the nail salon, Sylvia arrived home, her long pert ponytail and big sunglasses, shattering the dusty quiet of the house with her brisk, clopping heels, tossing keys and purse on the kitchen table. Bertie erupted with a shout.
“Mommie!”
“Hey doodle-bug! What a day. Grandma okay? Forget Miller Time. Momma needs a shot.”
Bertie clung to her side and began chattering about the events of the day, what her dolls had done, what kind of sandwich she’d had for lunch, Grady’s progress on the house. She followed Sylvia out on the porch as she collapsed in a folding chair and lit a cigarette. Bertie prattled on: how was her day? what’s it like at the nail salon? and when would momma do her nails, could she come to the salon?
“Bertie for godsakes! Let me catch my breath. Go pull that pizza out of the freezer, and then take grandma her meds. Momma’s got a date tonight.”
Unseen from around the corner, Grady listened as he washed out paint brushes at the water spigot. He saw Bertie drag little feet back into the house, and his mother sitting alone reclining behind big glamorous sunglasses.
It wasn’t surprising when momma was out at night Fridays and Saturdays. It had been over a year since their father had gone for cigarettes on his Harley and never returned. Now she started to go on weeknights to the Donahue Lounge at the highway intersection where all the hotels were. She solicited drinks and danced with strangers and travelers. Increasingly she did not come home after work.
Weeks passed. One day near the end of the painting project, when Grady was up high on the ladder, Bertie got worked up into a restless panic. She set out on her little bike with a jelly sandwich and a bag of M&Ms in her tiny backpack. Down the sidewalk she pedaled her bike, passing stop sign after stop sign, turning toward what she hoped was the center of town, but soon the streets ceased to be familiar. She reached an unknown retail area with traffic lights and gritty sun-bleached parking lots. In a strip mall she saw a sign that she could sound-out the words Day Spa. With a flushed face and tears of relief welling in her eyes, she rode that direction. She knew momma would be working and she would have to wait patiently, but she told herself she would be so well behaved. Momma would be so happy to see her. Momma would laugh and introduce Bertie around the salon, maybe paint her nails pink and put clips in her hair. She would probably be hungry, and Bertie would hand her the sandwich and M&Ms. Dropping her bike on the sidewalk in front, she heaved open the door to the little shop. She walked in and looked at the strange adult faces. She did not see Momma.
“Does my momma work here? Her name is Sylvia.”
The lady at the front desk did not know anyone named Sylvia. Bertie rode on.
Grady was at home, on the roof painting the panels of the chimney. By mid-afternoon, when the sweat was already washing the flecks of white paint from his arms, he heard a distant siren passing through his neighborhood. From the roof he spied the emergency vehicles on the cross street, then turning on to his street, and then blaring right up until they stopped in front of his house. He came down as a police car was stopping in the driveway with an ambulance right behind.
They rolled grandmother out on a gurney, her eyes closed, mouth open and her jaw hung loose like a snorer, the oxygen mask removed. She’d had enough presence of mind to call before collapsing on the floor. Grady had known Officer O’Toole all his life and he was tilting reluctantly toward him. Grandmother had not survived the stroke, he said. Grady, hands on his hips, breathed and gave a deep exhale. After a reverent pause, Officer O’Toole asked about Sylvia. She was needed at the station to answer some questions. It was then that Grady realized Bertie and her bike were missing.
A tide of needles swept across his scalp. Minutes later, he was rumbling around the residential streets in his grandmother’s truck looking for Bertie. O’Toole stood conflicted but didn’t interfere. Grady scanned neighbors’ yards looking for the little bike. Suddenly, he knew exactly where she had gone. Did Bertie even know where the salon was?
When he pulled up the truck at the salon he saw the manager Gloria, a short middle-aged Latina, locking the door and preparing to leave.
“It’s only one o’clock,” said Grady.
She flickered a smile of polite frustration. Sylvia was gone, she said. She’d given no notice, just left. A tall, good-looking man had shown up in a long sedan. A brief whispered conversation, and before she knew what was going on, Sylvia was gathering her purse and sunglasses and walking out with him. She chirped they were going to San Antonio for a long weekend getaway. She’d be back on Monday. Without her nail technician, there was no point in keeping the shop open. And no, she had not seen Bertie.
The police told him later that underage driving was a serious matter and he deserved a ticket, but it was a wise decision to go by the station to notify them of the missing Bertie. On the drive to the station, it dawned on him—there was no one left to take care of Bertie. Mom wouldn’t have heard the news about grandma. When he arrived at the police station and saw the pink bicycle leaned against the hedges by the front door. He hadn’t realized how tense his whole upper body had become since he first noticed her bike missing.
Inside Bertie was sitting on a bench looking forlorn, eating crackers with a stocky female officer beside her. Her clothes were rumpled, her face was flushed and lined with grit, and her thin hair was drying out. She had the same sad droop in her eyes that she had the days when she sat by the front window waiting for momma to arrive home. She saw Grady and her eyes widened. She jumped off the bench and ran to him.
“Where’s momma?” she pleaded.
When he didn’t answer immediately, her head plunged into his hip and she grabbed his waist and cried into his jeans.
“C’mon. I’ll get you an ice cream.”
Jeffrey Allen Mays’ short fiction has been published in Catapult/Topology Magazine, Please See Me, and God and Nature. His debut novel The Former Hero was published in 2014 by AEC Stellar Publishing and became winner of the 2015 Texas Association of Authors Book Award as well as finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards. In 2020 Jeffrey received his MFA and now teaches writing at St. Edwards and Concordia Universities in Austin, Texas.