her.”
“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“You seem unusually adamant about that.”
“I told you: we’re closed.”
The discussion is over. She follows me to the door and locks it behind me.
I’m sitting next to Grandma in the car. She’s clicking the buttons on her phone as blocks fall down the tiny screen. She’s not really playing so much as absently interacting with the game. Her brain on autopilot.
I inch it out of her hands. “There were no signs warning me to floss,” I say.
She looks up at me. “Oh you’ve absolutely got to floss.”
“Grandma Lane, nothing about that place screamed dental office.”
I look on the card I took. It reads: “For appointment, call 415–555–1041.”
Maybe Pauline’s right. Maybe I’m seeing conspiracies everywhere and focusing on distractions and pathologies instead of real life.
“Still,” I say.
“What’s that?”
I take Grandma’s hand in mine.
“Do you remember Thelma and Louise?”
“Were they in our family?” she asks.
“Batman and Robin, Sherlock and Watson, the Lone Ranger and Tonto?”
“Sherlock was a great man.”
“We could be the new dynamic duo: the Overwhelmed and the Octogenarian.”
“I don’t know them.”
“How about: ‘Kid Commitment Phobe and Granny.’ My superpower can be fleeing, and yours knitting.”
She doesn’t respond.
“I can come up with something better than that. Give me some time.”
“Time is nothing to be squandered, Nathaniel,” she says, seeming bemused.
“Grandma?”
“Yes, grandson?”
“How about Butch Cassidy and the Sunset Kid?”
“I like that very much.”
“Time for us to leap into action.”
Chapter 17
The corner of Hayes and Buchanan looks like a bulldoze site waiting to happen. It is home to a low-income housing project in the Western Addition, one of the islands of San Francisco that has temporarily escaped gentrification. Prevailing economics can’t support these low-income renters any more than, eventually, they can support me.
Next to the dilapidated green apartment complex, three boys play hoops on a cracked cement basketball court with a bent orange rim.
We park across the street in a spot that puts me in the sun and lets Grandma, sitting in the passenger seat, get shade by the lone tree on the block. This is the end of San Francisco’s second summer, neither of which takes place during the traditional months of June to September. Our first summer happens in the early spring, and the second in September and October. Now it’s warm in the middle of the day, cool and damp at morning and evening, rain and fog starting to visit at night, and destined to bring a quick end to these blissful moments of sun basking.
Grandma and I are half an hour early for a meeting I hope will explain everything, or anything — the shooting, the thumb drive, whether aliens visited Roswell.
The plate-glass door of the large apartment building opens and a short, wiry boy walks out dribbling a ball.
“Lane smooched a colored boy,” Grandma says. “That’s what they said.”
“What does that mean?”
“I came from Eastern Europe,” she responds. “Not Western Europe.”
“You are correct. What does that have to do with you kissing a boy?”
“I grew up in Denver. I think you know that. There was a boy who lived in our neighborhood named Randall. He was colored. Now we say something else.”
“African-American.”
“We liked to talk about books, but that’s all we ever did was talk about books, and once we went to a museum. And his name was Randall.”
“You said that, Grandma.”
“What?”
“What happened with Randall?”
She pauses. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
I suspect she’s going to tell me that the other kids made fun of her because she was friends with a colored boy. She can’t confirm this. She’s slipped away.
I look at the clock. It is 2:50.
“Grandma, as long as we’re on the topic of Denver, would you like to tell me the rest of your story and what happened at the bakery your father owned? Remember, you were telling me about the Idle clan?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“We never got to finish our conversation. My notes are incomplete, and I’d love to know your story.”
“I already told the box,” she says.
“You told the box — you mean you told your story to the computer?”
No response.
“My turn to tell a kissing story,” I say.
I know Grandma’s not really listening. But I’m trying to pass the time, so I start talking about Pauline. Maybe I’m fueled by a memory of past talks with Grandma — her genuine interest, deep visceral laughter, a feeling she gave me that my decisions always made complete sense.
“Pauline, my boss, she listens like you do,” I mutter. “She leaves me satisfied, like comfort food.”
“Are you telling me a story or eating?”
I laugh. “Thank you for calling me out on my nonsensical simile.”
She looks at me.
“We met a year ago on a hike organized by mutual friends,” I continue.
“You’re smiling, Nathaniel.”
I tell Grandma that Pauline and I split off from the rest of the group and before I knew it, we had walked two hours and talked. On the way back to the cabin, Pauline stopped and pointed. Frozen ten yards in front of us was a deer, paralyzed. Then it did something I wouldn’t have predicted in a million years. It took a step toward Pauline, then another. When it was three feet from her it stopped, and sniffed the air. And then it lowered its head and started chomping on grass.
“You are beloved by animals and you look good in shorts,” I whispered to Pauline.
The deer didn’t even look up before bolting.
“You just look good in shorts,” Pauline said.
We both cleared our throats. On the way back to the car, I had the weirdest thought: if I see another deer tonight, I’ll ask her out. I didn’t and I wound up burying my urges and working for Pauline.
“What kind of bullshit abdication was it to leave my fate to a deer?” I say to Grandma.
“You are angry.”
I rub my hand on my forehead. “I’m confused. I went to see a shrink, a few months ago, just once.”
