The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [37]
“Nana?”
I was old enough to be left alone, but I panicked. “Nana?” She’d never not been there, dusting plastic fruit or crying depressed in her armchair, muttering her rosary or waiting at the kitchen table with a glass of apple juice and a triangle of bready cake. “Nana?”
I rushed into her room: empty. The bathroom, empty too. Then down the back stairs to Peggy’s apartment.
She looked up from the Tarot cards spread out on her kitchen table like a meal. “Sorry, Frances. I haven’t seen her all day.”
Across the street to Kim’s Groceries: “No. She no come today.”
Nana had no friends, few appointments.
I ran the seven blocks to the old stone church in the early winter drizzle. Maybe she suddenly came up with some ancient sin she had to confess? But Father Michaels’s office was abandoned.
“Where is she?” I begged the dim-lit image of Our Lord above the altar. All the times I’d wished her dead, gone, or disappeared rushed to mind like a mudslide. All the times she wouldn’t let me go to the Esprit Outlet or Stonestown Mall on the bus; all the times I knew I couldn’t bring anyone home to play jacks in the green-carpeted living room because she’d be there in her stupid old chair, weeping like a stupid old woman. I swear I didn’t mean it.
I walked home slowly under the magnolias, the sounds of the city fading into a faraway clamor. I climbed the red-carpeted stairs, pushed open the door to our still-empty apartment, sat down at the blue kitchen table to wait. Maybe she got lost somewhere. Maybe she took the wrong bus and ended up in Hunter’s Point. What if she was hit by a car? What if she wasn’t carrying any identification? The last dusky light of day sighed through the windowpane. The white-faced clock on the kitchen wall ticked away the seconds and minutes and hours. I waited like a four-year-old for her parents. Sometimes people just never come home. Finally. Eight o’clock. A fumbling at the door. “Nana?” Tears welled up in my eyes.
She wobbled in, smelling of beer and the faint residue of a smoky room. “I’m so late,” she giggled.
I stared at her. “Where were you, Nana?”
“Oh,” she blushed. “Didn’t you start dinner?”
“Where were you?”
But my Nana just sighed. “Oh, child, there were decades when I never worried about anyone’s after-school cake.” She lumbered into her room and closed the white door behind her.
Neither of us ate.
Decades?
Chapter 14
DOT
“Good morning, Goldilocks.”
I open my eyes in the pillowy impressionist light of the cabin. Exposed wood beams on the ceiling. I start to sit up, disoriented. The far drumming of a woodpecker reminds me of where I am, how I got here. “I’m sorry, I—”
The voice stands at the table, stirring instant coffee crystals into steaming mugs. She’s old, but I can’t tell how old, white hair braided into a coronet around her head. Tall and slightly disheveled, she wears a shapeless blue housedress.
“The old minister in Sacramento sent me, I—” I climb out of bed, still dressed in my dusty jeans and Sesame Street T-shirt.
“I like a girl who sleeps in her clothes,” the voice winks. “You never know when they’ll come for you.”
I run my fingers through my hair, nervous as a thief.
Outside the open window, a hawk glides from its perch.
“I waited up,” I start to explain.
“Was I out past my curfew?” She smiles, pushes a mugful of black coffee across the table in my direction. Austere features, strong jaw, not a stitch of makeup on her face. “I’d lock the door if I wanted to keep the riffraff out.”
“I guess you would.” I sip the unsweetened coffee.
“Dot,” she says as she offers me a hunk of dark rye bread, places another next to her own mug on the table. “Dorothy, really.” She moves for the door, the heel of the loaf in hand. “Breakfast!” she calls from the porch. A long, low whistle.
I watch through the doorway as the jays and orange-breasted robins glide down from the pines. A few chipmunks scurry up the stairs.
“Don’t mind our guest,” Dorothy whispers. “She’s just passing through.