I swallow against a swell of nausea, but I can’t bring myself to answer.
Annie’s hand closes over my wrist. I meet her pitying gaze. “It’s going to be okay,” she says gently. Then she tilts her head and gives me a weak smile. “I mean, Ma’s not coming, but that’s probably not a bad thing, right?”
I wipe my brow with the back of my hand and shake my head. I can’t just sit in the car like a coward, so I push open the door and step into airless humidity. The thought of fainting hadn’t occurred to me before, but now it seems a real possibility.
My legs feel like they belong to someone else as I make my way across the lawn, but before I’m halfway there, the front door swings open with a squeak of hinges I’ve known all my life.
And Grandma Quincy is there.
“Thank God.” Gray headed, plump, and shorter than Annie, my grandmother bustles down the walk and grabs me around the middle, squeezing me just like my sister did two hours ago. My arms fall around her, and when I look down at the top of her head, a swirl of iron gray waves pinned up in a rough bun, I can feel the ground beneath my feet for the first time.
Grandma Q whispers into my shirt. “It’s so good to have you back.”
Movement catches my eye, and I look up to see my Aunt Josie standing in the open doorway. She’s shading her eyes against the glare of the sun, so I have no way of knowing what she’s thinking.
Her hair’s longer than I remember, falling to her shoulders, and maybe she’s a little more full figured than she was eight years ago, but she still looks great. And she looks like Ma, which stings and soothes me all at once.
Grandma Q untangles from me and turns to Josie. “Come welcome your nephew home,” she says. It’s not an order, just a nudge, but I wonder if being here is really Josie’s idea. I don’t want any of my family to feel compelled to see me. I’m not the black sheep of the family.
I’m the Black Plague.
But Josie smiles when she steps out, and she approaches me with her arms outstretched. Grandma steps aside, and then my aunt is hugging me, and I’m nothing but confusion.
“Welcome back, Andrew.” She squeezes me. I close my arms around her, but I don’t hug her as tightly as I did Grandma. I don’t understand. If she’s happy to see me, why didn’t I hear ever from her?
And then she says something that nearly knocks me down. “I’m so sorry, Drew.” I hear a catch in her throat, and when she pulls back, Josie wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I should have come to see you, but I didn’t want to upset Lottie. I should have written at least. I hope you can forgive me.”
My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. I close it, swallow, and then try again. “I don’t blame you, Aunt Josie,” I manage. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
Instead of making her feel better, I see I’ve done the opposite because my aunt starts sobbing, and she clutches me into her arms again.
“Oh, Drew.” She cries against me. “It’s like we lost both of you, and now you’re back. You don’t know how good it is… what it means to see you.”
No words come to my aid. I just pat Josie lamely on the shoulder. Because she makes it sound like I’m back from the dead, and while this isn’t entirely untrue, it still feels cosmically unfair. If anyone deserves to be resurrected, it’s Anthony, not me.
But like Lazarus, this world no longer makes sense to me, and I’m lost in it. I’d give anything to go somewhere and hide for a while.
And it’s as though Grandma Quincy reads my mind, because she tugs at Josie’s shirtsleeve to get her to release me. “C’mon, Josephine, let’s show Andrew upstairs. I’m sure he’d like to settle in and rest before the others show up.” Her eyes, merry but watchful, shoot up to mine. “The brisket still has another two hours, so you’ve got a little time to yourself.”
I want to kiss my grandmother’s feet, but instead, I follow her around the side of the house to the detached garage.
“Annie and I have had a time getting this place up to snuff,” she tells me as we mount the wrought iron stairs that lead to the apartment. “I hadn’t touched your grandpa’s workshop all these years, and when we finally came up here, it was full of sawdust, cobwebs, and mouse scat.”
I want to tell her that after eight years without a shred of privacy, anything with four walls and quiet will be a palace as far as I’m concerned, but I shy away from talking at all, much less talking about prison.
She pushes open the door, and the scent of lumber and wood stain punches me in the nose. Grandpa Pete. The space is immaculate. In place of his table saw and workbench is a futon and a dinette table, but the smell and the way the light from the windows warms the exposed tongue-in-groove walls has me choking against a rush of memories.
Grandpa Pete teaching me how to use a lathe. Grandpa Pete letting me borrow his jigsaw to make my own skateboard. Grandpa Pete lighting his pipe and sitting down at the top of the stairs beside me the night after my father left us.
He died six months after I went to Angola. Bone cancer. He and Grandma Q had come to my preliminary hearing and my sentencing, but by then he was in too much pain to make the two hour drive to visit.
I’ve asked myself if burying one grandson and seeing another thrown behind bars hastened his death. No doubt, it added to his suffering.
And that’s on me.
“He loved being up here,” Grandma Quincy says, as though she’s clued into my thoughts. “There’ve been more than a few times when I’ve found myself making dinner, and I actually walk to the back door to call him in… Even after all this time.”
I force myself to look down at my grandmother, but her eyes are fixed straight ahead, taking in the light and space and probably seeing Grandpa Pete.