It was already starting to get dark when he pulled open the latch on Grandma’s low wooden gate and walked up the pretty stone-paved path, flanked by neatly trimmed lawn. Grandma’s chair sat to one side, the low table beside it covered with rings that had dried into the wood from her daily ritual of an afternoon iced tea throughout the summer while she read. Opposite was evidence of her gardening projects: pretty flowers and a small herb garden, stone statues of painted gnomes and brown bunny rabbits twice the size of Coop.
The porch light illuminated the stone-canopied brick step in yellow, and warmth poured out through the frosted glass panes on the arched wooden front door. Oscar rang the doorbell and waited, his humble offering of wafer rolls sitting in his hand.
The door swung open, and Oscar’s cheeks warmed as hecaught his sister’s piercing blue eyes over the threshold. He’d evaded her for so long. And through what fault of her own?
“Hey.” But Lina’s voice was soft, her mouth curving as she found him. “Good. Dinner’s ready.” She stepped back, allowing him to pass.
Oscar kicked off his shoes, then pulled off his socks, because the idea of carpet rubbing any other fabric made him want to poke knives into his ear drums and pull out all his teeth.
As a child, this hallway had meant swinging from Grandpa’s arms, running up and down while Grandma yelled at him and Lina not to break any of the vases. A little more grown up, Oscar remembered this hallway as warmth, a woman who loved him and who didn’t care that he smelled like shit because there was no water in the place he’d found himself squatting in over the previous few weeks. He remembered the carpet as the first clean thing he’d touched in days, the smell of wood polish and soup as the silver lining reminding him that there would always be a place in which Papa had existed, in which he had been alive and happy without having to suffer Oscar’s mother.
Oscar shook away his thoughts of those first few months after leaving home, the in-between, the liminal space in which he neither lived with his mother nor alone. Like Schrödinger’s Cat: neither Oscar nor NotOscar, neither happy nor sad, neither fully living nor doornail dead.
“Lina, who’s this stranger you’ve brought into my kitchen?” Grandma mock gasped, narrowing her brown eyes at Oscar, pursed lips wrinkling the skin around her mouth. “You take that long to come by again, you’ll find an obituary waiting, Ozzy.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Grandma.” Oscar rolled his eyes and approached her, bending for a kiss on his forehead, like he was still that nine-year-old kid running to Grandma for anythingwith sugar. Like he was still that scared teenager crawling to Grandma for a shower. “I’ve just had…a lot going on.”
“Oh, I know!” Grandma tutted, waving her wooden spoon in the air. “If I ever catch you getting life-altering surgeries again and not asking for my help…” Her words trailed off into a grumble as she turned towards the pot to stir one final time before serving.
Oscar knew better than to offer any help, knowing he would be refused, so he sat adjacent to Lina and poured himself a glass of fizzy orange soda. He hated the damn drink, never bought any for his own apartment, but it wasn’t dinner at Grandma’s without at least half a gallon of orange soda consumed.
“Did you hear me, Oscar Peters?” Grandma asked, setting down a plate of spaghetti in front of him. He smiled at the cut up hot dogs, the pale orange sauce and tomato chunks. He’d missed this.
“Yes, Grandma. Next time I cut off my boobs, I’ll invite you to bear witness.”
Lina snorted, earning a cutting glare from the woman who had raised their gentle papa, then cleared her throat, as though it would do anything to earn back Grandma’s favor.
“Thanks, Grandma,” she said, twirling her fork around the spaghetti while Oscar shoveled grated cheese onto his own mound of pasta.
“I could have helped you, Ozzy,” Grandma said then, softening as she sat down. She took the teaspoon from Oscar’s grip and continued putting cheese onto his plate. Oscar let her. “I could have made you soup and helped you clean up.”
Oscar picked up his fork, signaling the end of cheesing, and shrugged, searching for the right words. He’d never been too good at asking for help, admitting he needed it. After his stint on the streets and then living at Grandma’s for months until he had enough of a steady wage to pay any form of rentin any place acceptable to the shark-eyed old woman, he’d sworn he would never again put himself in a position where he would have no choice but to beg for someone to come to his rescue.
Maybe if Papa were still alive, Oscar wouldn’t mind.
But Papa wasn’t.
“I had a nurse from the clinic,” he said, settling on the truth in the end. “I didn’t need to lift a finger.”
As Grandma’s fork scraped the bottom of the plate, Oscar knew he’d likely said the wrong thing. The trap closed around his leg the moment Grandma’s wrist stopped moving.
“And how many fingers would you have needed to lift to give me a call, hmm?” But her eyes were glimmering with play and fondness, and Oscar knew he was off the hook. Even if Grandmadidseem a little hurt. He’d make it up to her. In the end, Oscar was Papa’s boy, and he always did.
“Just the one,” Oscar replied, wagging his thumb at her. “You know, we don’t punch numbers on plastic receivers anymore, Grandma.” The corners of his lips itched, and Oscar gave in, flashing her one of his grins.
“Smart ass.”
Grandma paused for a forkful of pasta. Oscar did the same, his entire body sagging in the chair as the tastes of his childhood barreled into him, painting a picture of an old man in the chair across from him, Papa sitting to his own father’s right, eyes crinkled, always smiling, the blurry image of his frosty mother beside Lina.
“And how are you, dear? How’s your recovery?”
“Good,” Oscar replied. He paused to chew on another massive ball of spaghetti, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of a hot dog. “Actually,” Oscar said, lips twitching once again, this time with the joy that had been sitting in his heart since the previous night. “It’s been absolutely marvelous.”
Oscar had missed his grandmother’s couch. Brown and soft with the knit throw she’d wrap around herself to watch the gameshows before bedtime, it reminded him of dozing off and being carried to the car.
When Oscar was a child, the safest place in the world sat on the invisible line between the inner elbows of his papa’s arms, the soft press of his papa’s chest against a lolling head, the warm dry kiss on his temple as he was laid down on the backseat of their clunky car.
“Are you going to tell me what’s got you smiling like that?” Grandma asked, tearing him out of his reverie. After he’d blurted out that he was practically walking on the clouds, Oscar had changed the subject to Lina’s part-time job and her running, but now his sister was washing dishes after insisting that Oscar and Grandma hadn’t seen each other in way too long and needed to catch up.
