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I wasn’t aware he had aunts. Or, until he mentioned her earlier, a living grandmother. “Anything I should know about them?”
“Except for my mom and Frankie, I haven’t seen them in six years.”
“Seriously?”
He frowns. “You think I’m fucking around?”
I don’t. My stomach hurts. “Sorry. How should—who should I say I am?”
“Tell them whatever you want.” He rings the doorbell.
I have time to take a breath and think, This is going to be weird, before the door is pulled open directly into the kitchen.
The first thing I notice is that there’s a woman sobbing at the table.
Like, sobbing.
Two other women and three kids are crowded into the room with her, but I don’t pay much attention to them, because the second thing I notice is that the woman who opened the door
has West’s eyes exactly.
Nobody has eyes like West’s. Even West doesn’t, since his eyes look one way one day and another way the next, depending on the light and his mood and all kinds of factors I can’t pin down. I’ve wondered what it says on his driver’s license, because there is no word for the color his eyes are.
It’s trippy, seeing West’s eyes in the wrinkled face of a woman.
Other than the eyes, the resemblance is scanty. She has to tip her head way back to talk to him, because this woman is short. She’s round in every direction—boobs, hips, butt—with salt-and-pepper hair cut close to her head. She’s takes a drag off a cigarette held in her left hand, and I notice when she puts it to her lips that her fingers seem to take off in a new direction at each swollen knuckle joint.
“Will wonders never cease?” she says.
Far from a welcome. I kind of expect her to exhale right in West’s face and then slam the door, but she turns her head to the side instead and says, “Michelle, look who’s here.”
I know that Michelle is West’s mom. She looks up.
Her eyes are like dark holes punched into dough.
“Who’s that?” Her voice is hoarse, terrible to hear. I want to cover my face with my hands.
“This is Caroline,” West says.
She blinks. Rubs at her eyes. Blinks again. “Caroline who?”
Behind a closed door between the kitchen and the other room, a toilet flushes. West asks his grandma, “What’s she on?”
“She’s been like this all day.”
“Fuck.” He inhales deeply. “Can we come in?”
“Introduce us,” his grandmother says.
“Caroline, this is my grandma, Joan. Grandma, Caroline.” He points across the kitchen. “Aunt Stephanie, Aunt Heather, and my cousins Tyler, Taylor, and … I don’t know that one.”
“Hailey,” the woman named Heather says.
“Hailey,” West repeats. “Good to meet you, Hailey. I’m West.”
I shake West’s grandmother’s hand and offer a weak, “Hi.”
“I brought her to stay with Frankie,” West says.
