I hold the pizza box in my lap. After a couple of moments, her eyes snap back open with a start as if awakening from a dream. “Y’all eat. Pizza’s getting cold.”
She offers some to Papaw, but he waves her off. I hope he’s eaten something tonight. His once-prodigious appetite is now a ghost of itself.
“What y’all been talking about?” Mamaw asks, like she’s not expecting much. And she shouldn’t, normally.
Papaw nods at me. “You wanna tell her, Mickey Mouse, or I will?”
“One of you,” Mamaw says.
I inhale deeply. It feels gluttonous to do that around Papaw. “Delaney got a scholarship offer from a prep school up north. And she got them to give me one too.”
Mamaw searches Papaw’s face for some hint of a joke, some glint in his eyes. He has no poker face with her, so he’d be caught quickly. He raises his eyebrows as if to say, I know, but not this time. He slaps at a mosquito.
Mamaw turns back to me. I tell her everything I told Papaw.
She sits quietly for a long time, Papaw’s oxygen tank punctuating the silence with whispering puffs. Finally, she asks, “So. What do you think?”
I shrug.
“Tell you what I told him,” Papaw says. “Said he ought to go.”
Mamaw sits still, staring at Papaw. She nods slightly. “I’m with you. I think he ought to.”
I start to speak, but Mamaw cuts me off. “Now, hang on and let me say my piece. We’ve tried to give you everything we could, and it hadn’t always been much. Now along comes a chance for you to have something that we could never give you. Falls right in your lap.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t deserve this.”
Mamaw sits forward in her chair, energized. The exhaustion has melted from her. “No, you didn’t deserve to lose your mama. Plenty’s fallen in your lap you didn’t deserve. This isn’t one of those things. Let the Lord bless you with one good thing to make up for all the rest.”
“What about y’all?” I ask.
“We’ll get by. Wasn’t you planning on college in a couple years anyhow?” Mamaw asks.
“East Tennessee State maybe.”
“There you go.”
“But ETSU is close. I love it here. I love the river. I love y’all.”
Papaw coughs and spits off the edge of the porch. “And you can still love all that while you see more of the world. If I’da had the chance? I would’ve. Donna Bird, wouldn’t you?”
“I would indeed.” Mamaw drums her fingers on her armrest for emphasis. “You know Aunt Betsy’s grandbaby, Blake? She moved him to Nashville so’s he could go to a good performing school.”
“That didn’t turn out well.”
Papaw says, “How about Tess? We ain’t talked about her yet.”
“Didn’t you say Delaney got you the scholarship offer?” Mamaw asks.
“That’s right.”
“I imagine she’s scared stiff to go to that school alone.”
“What if she don’t go because you don’t? Or she goes and can’t concentrate on her studies because she’s too lonely?” Papaw says. He takes a couple of moments to catch his breath. “That girl’ll cure cancer someday, she gets the chance. But that there’s the key.” He pauses to cough. “The chance. Sounds like she thinks she needs your support. Else she wouldn’t have wheeled and dealed for you.”
“Wouldn’t you miss her?” Mamaw asks.
“Absolutely.”
“You got an opportunity to do something great for yourself and your best friend,” Papaw says.
“I know,” I murmur. I stare off into the darkness.
“I can always tell when you’re thinking about something without saying it,” Papaw says after a long while.
“What about your situation?” I ask quietly.
He wheezes, coughs, and spits off the porch. “Something the matter with me?”
We laugh. But our laughter quickly subsides. “I need to be here,” I say.
“ ’Cause I’ll live forever if you stay?”
“I owe you.”
He snorts. “For what?”
“Everything.”
“Tell you something, son.” He pauses to take a few shallow breaths. His voice is sober. “I love you. But I’ll be damned if I’m why you let a chance like this go.” Pause to breathe. Wheeze. Cough. “Death’s all around us. We live our whole lives in its shadow. It’ll do what it will. So we need to do what we will while we can.”
With that, our conversation dwindles.
I rock and feel on my face the caress of the cool evening air, scented by the damp green of broken vines and cut grass. Beside me, Mamaw and Papaw hold hands but don’t speak.
Above us is an immaculate chaos of white stars and drifting moonlit-silver clouds. I remember how I would sit under the sanctuary of the night sky, into the late hours, waiting for my mama to get home. Or to escape her dopesick moaning and thrashing. Or to avoid the red-rimmed, whiskey-fogged glare of a new boyfriend. Or because I needed to feel like there was something beautiful in this world that could never be taken from me.
Papaw coughs and coughs. Eventually, he collects himself.
I listen to his shallow, uneven respiration. Ask me to number the breaths I wish for you. One more. Ask me a thousand times. The answer will always be one more.
For a while it seems like Papaw’s about to say something, but he doesn’t. Finally, he says, “Welp,” and leans forward.
I help him out of his rocker and into bed.
I didn’t even know she was there.
She came and went at such unpredictable times. I had gotten home from school and watched a couple of hours of TV, waiting for her to get back from wherever she was. We didn’t always have a TV. It would disappear mysteriously and be replaced some time later with something worse than what we had. Also, we had just gotten our electricity turned back on, and I had to take advantage.
It was only when I got up to pee that I discovered her. She had collapsed in the cramped and squalid bathroom of our cramped and squalid trailer and fallen with her body wedged against the locked door. I knocked, and when no answer came, I pounded and screamed, yelling “Mama” and also her name. I was afraid to call 911 because I didn’t want her to go to jail, the evidence of her drug use so plainly on display. I was afraid of going into foster care.