Page 74 of Goodbye Days

The woman shakes her head and gently pushes the bill away. “No, ma’am. I lost a nephew in a motorcycle accident a few years ago. Grief makes fools of us all.”

Nana Betsy puts the bill back in her purse. “Yes it does. Anyway. I’m sorry again if I offended you.”

“No apology necessary. I hope you two have a lovely rest of your night.”

We walk to the car.

“That wasn’t bad,” I say. “The real thing works better than a whoopee cushion, though. Makes it easier to maintain the eye contact that Blake said was so essential.”

Nana Betsy smiles. “At my age, you don’t risk that sort of thing, even if I could manage the way Blake could.”

She unlocks the car and we get in.

“Did you take a good video?”

“Yeah. Do you want me to upload the videos for you?”

“Would you? Here.” She hands me a slip of paper with Blake’s YouTube login information. I log in from my phone and upload the two videos we recorded.

“That was tough. I’d never want to do it again. We go about our lives doing everything we can to keep from looking silly,” Nana Betsy says.

“It’s fear. We’re just afraid.”

“He lived for that rush of doing something ridiculous to brighten someone’s day. He did that over and over again—faced down the fear to make people laugh. I don’t know how he did it. I almost died in there.”

No one knows how anybody lives through anything. People just do.

The shadows are long and the light hazy and golden when we get back to Nana Betsy’s house.

She seems more somber and contemplative now. Maybe shooting the video broke one last wall inside her. “I’m about beat,” she says. “But there’s one more thing I had planned.”

We go to the kitchen, where she opens a bulging brown paper bag sitting on the counter. It’s filled with large ears of corn.

She fumbles in a cabinet for a pot and fills it with water. She doesn’t look at me. Something has descended upon her. “When Blake was eight, Mitzi forbade me from seeing him. She said she was tired of my getting in her business. They moved up to Johnson City, about an hour away, to make things harder.” Her voice is so hushed, I strain to hear.

She puts the pot on the stove and turns on the burner. She takes a piece of corn from the sack and begins shucking it.

“Can I help you with that?” I grab an ear and start shucking it beside her.

“Please. Anyway, I’m sitting at home one night and Blake calls. I’ll never forget how small and thin his voice was. He said, ‘Nana, Mama’s been gone for three days and I’m scared.’ I said, ‘Honey, enough’s enough. Nana’s coming for you.’ ”

She takes the ears of shucked corn and lowers them into the water. She sits down at the table, and I join her.

“So I load up Rolly’s shotgun and put it in the car. I’m ready to take my grandson home at gunpoint from my own daughter and whoever else if need be. Can you imagine?”

“No.” We laugh even though it’s not funny.

“So I drive as fast as I’ve ever driven. When I get there…the smell when I opened that trailer door. I still remember it.” She shudders with the sense memory. “Garbage mixed with cigarette smoke and filthy clothes and spoiled milk and rotten meat. Which is odd because I didn’t see a thing in the house to eat that came from nature. Old Mountain Dew bottles and empty Twinkies boxes and crumpled-up potato chip bags lying everywhere. You hear people talk about living in a dump? This was truly worse than the garbage dump. To this day, I can’t fathom how human beings lived there.”

“Jesu—jeez.”

“I call out to Blake, and I finally find him hiding under the bed. I put down the shotgun so’s I don’t frighten him. He comes out and he’s filthy. He looks and smells like he hasn’t bathed in a month. Which makes sense, because I try a faucet and nothing comes out. He’s covered in sores and bug bites. He has a hand-shaped bruise on his back and another that looks to be a shoe print.”

It feels wrong to speak now, so I don’t. Terrible things can be as holy as beautiful things, in their way. I have no words, besides. This story is as new to me as the news of Blake’s sexuality was to Nana Betsy, and I can only receive it.

She checks on the corn and returns.

“So we leave fast as can be. I left Rolly’s loaded shotgun for them as a little present. Just clean forgot it. They probably hawked it and used the money to buy meth before they even noticed Blake was gone. When we get home, it’s past midnight. The grocery store’s closed and I’m too exhausted to go anyway. But I want Blake to have something to eat. I don’t want him going to bed hungry even one more time. I want to feed him something that grew in the soil; that soaked up the sun. So I had this bag of corn that I’d bought the day before from a farm stand. It was beautiful. We ate it warm with butter and salt. It was sweet as candy. He ate three ears.”