Claire peers through the curtains, past the grime on the window, and out at the front yard. Everything looks dead. The fan hums in the background.
Sighing, she turns and pulls clothes out of her suitcase until she finds her Walkman. It still has the cassette that Josh gave her, with all those darkly dreamy gothic bands. She’s been listening to it nonstop since the end of the school year, ever since she found the cassette waiting for her in her locker, wrapped up in a sheet of notebook paper. Lovely Claire was written across the front in fancy looping script.
Claire sprawls out on the bed and stares up at the globe lamp hanging from the ceiling. Old-fashioned. Everything in this house is old-fashioned. She closes her eyes, loops on her earphones, and hits play. The music erupts mid-song. She can barely understand the lyrics, but maybe that’s the point. The fan cools her skin. Maybe she can stay like this until August, trapped in a coma of music and heat.
A knock at the door.
Claire sits up and pulls off her earphones. Grammy walks in without waiting for permission.
“You aren’t going to unpack?” Grammy asks, steadying herself against the doorframe.
“It’s too hot.”
Grammy snorts. “You’ll get used to it.”
Claire doesn’t say anything.
“I thought I’d show you the kitchen. Your mother said you can cook?”
Claire shrugs. “I had to learn. She and Dad are never home.”
“Well, that’s more than she can say for herself at your age. Come along.”
Claire tosses the Walkman aside and follows Grammy out into the hallway. It’s like walking through water. The air fills her lungs and stays there.
The few times Claire has been to Grammy’s house before, it was always Christmas. The house looks empty without strands of garland and a blinking tree shimmering with tinsel. Claire imagines she’ll get used to seeing it this way. The thought depresses her.
The kitchen looks empty too. Claire isn’t sure she’s ever seen it when it isn’t stacked with dishes and pots and pans, when her mother and aunt aren’t bustling around getting dinner ready.
“Just wanted to show you where everything is, so there won’t be any confusion later.” Grammy opens up drawers and cupboards and points things out as she talks. Her movements are slow and shaky and weak. Claire feels a pang of sympathy despite her annoyance with this whole situation. It’s not Grammy’s fault she’s sick, and it’s not necessarily Grammy’s fault that Claire doesn’t know much about her either. Her mother certainly hasn’t gone out of her way to make sure Claire ever had the chance to really speak with her own grandmother.
“Pans are here,” Grammy says. “Dishes. Silverware. Pantry. The stove is gas, you have to light it with a match.” She pulls a box of matches off the windowsill next to the sink. “Do you know how to do that? I’m sure your mother has the finest electric range in that tacky eyesore she calls a home up in Houston.”
“Yes, I know how to do it.” Claire shivers with annoyance.
“I don’t want you burning the house down.”
“I won’t.” The annoyance turns to rancor: How hopeless does Grammy think she is?
Grammy nods with satisfaction. “I like to eat dinner around five thirty. You can do what you’d like until then, assuming you’ve finished any chores. Watch out for the vermin. We’ve got rats out here and if you touch one you’ll get a disease.”
Claire doesn’t answer. Grammy surveys the kitchen, wisps of hair falling into her eyes. She doesn’t brush them away. “There are some things in the pantry,” she says. “Mrs. Freytag got them for me. Let me know when you need to buy more groceries.”
Claire nods.
“I’ve got to take my pills three times a day.” Grammy points at a divided plastic pillbox sitting on the windowsill next to the matches. “One with each meal. Nasty things, but the doctor insists, and I want you to make sure I don’t forget.”
“Okay,” Claire says.
“I’m not used to being sick.” Grammy stares at a blank spot on the wall beside the refrigerator. “Not used to it one damn bit.”
Claire doesn’t know what to say. She waits for Grammy to elaborate, to give her some hint as to how she should respond, but instead Grammy turns and shuffles out of the kitchen. A minute or two later, the television switches on, flooding the house with the roar of applause from an afternoon game show. Claire opens up the pantry: cans of tuna and cream of mushroom soup, some noodles, some boxed cereal, a loaf of bread. Claire shuts the pantry. The TV jangles in the background. It’s so hot, Claire can hardly think straight.
She doesn’t want to be inside this house anymore.
There’s a door next to the kitchen table that leads to the back patio. Claire slips out. A breeze blows in from the direction of the Gulf, cool and salty, and so it’s actually cooler out here than in the house. It’s probably even cooler on the beach.
Claire steps off the patio and walks over to the garage. It’s not attached to the house; it must have been built later, thrown together with leftover parts. Claire heaves the door open. The air inside is hot and stifling and smells faintly toxic. Grammy’s old Chrysler Cordoba lurks in the shadows. A string hangs down from the ceiling, and when Claire pulls it, the garage floods with yellow light. There’s not much space to move around the car, since the garage is filled with stacks of boxes and rusting tool parts, but Claire picks her way around the perimeter as best she can, mindful of spiders and scorpions and diseased rats.
She’s almost to the back of the garage when she spots the end of a handlebar poking out from behind a cardboard box of moldering books.
“My ride.” Claire’s voice bounces around strangely inside the garage.
She takes a deep breath and climbs up on the box of books, balancing herself as best she can. The bare lightbulb and the square of sunlight don’t reach all the way back here. The shadows crawl over her feet. She imagines a rat sticking its pointy face out of the darkness and biting her.
Still, a bike is better than walking, especially in a Texas summer. So Claire grabs hold of the handlebars and lifts. For a moment nothing happens, but then the bike jars loose. One of the boxes crashes down and its contents scatter across the floor—all yellowed school papers covered in an unfamiliar scrawl. Claire tugs the bike all the way free and wheels it out of the garage. Then she goes back in and cleans up the papers, shoving them haphazardly into the box. Her aunt Susan’s name is written across the top of them all. Claire doubts her own mother even keeps her report cards, even though she makes A’s every semester.
The bike waits for her out in the sun, although it’s so coated in dust it doesn’t even gleam. Plus the tires are flat. Figures. Claire swipes the dust off the seat, and her hand comes back coated in a layer of gray grime. Maybe there’s a bike pump buried somewhere in the garage, although given the way the summer’s gone so far, she’s not banking on it.
“Hello there!”
The voice comes out of nowhere, musical and bright like a wind chime. Claire jumps and looks over her shoulder.
A girl in a yellow sundress stands at the end of the driveway, a basket tucked in the crook of her elbow. She lifts her free arm and waves wildly, like she and Claire know each other.