Page 4 of Bad Intentions

When the sky breaks with the dawn light outside my window, I’m still awake, repeating, “I was never there,” hoping that the new day doesn’t become hell. I’ve had enough bad things happen to me for a lifetime. Although I feel like this one might turn out to be the worst.

3

JOSIE

I check the time on my phone—6:30 a.m. Grandma will probably sleep for at least another couple of hours. She used to be an early bird, busy every waking hour, living on less than six hours of sleep a day.

Before her diagnosis, that is.

Now she often sleeps in, naps during the day, and goes to bed at eight. However, she often gets up at night, somehow managing to know when I come and go. Old people are a mystery.

Sleepless, tired, a nervous wreck, I shove the blanket off me and get out of bed. My wet clothes are on the floor, and I throw them in the laundry basket. The sour smell of rain seems to have saturated this entire house.

I put on a fresh pair of jeans and a pullover. Since I moved here from the city, my style has hit an all-time low. But this town doesn’t have standards. Not really. Which suits me just fine. Carelessness and indifference are alarmingly easy to get used to, and I’m doing a stellar job. After the scandal in Pittsburgh, I don’t want to draw attention.

I walk to the kitchen and turn on the light.

Nothing much has changed at Grandma’s house since I moved out six years ago. The house is a comforting mix of old and new. Built-in kitchen cupboards that date to the 1940s but new appliances. Old cast-iron cookware that Grandma adores though it weighs a hundred pounds but a new coffee machine. Vintage four-poster beds in both bedrooms but five-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets. Old hardwood floors but Clarks slippers and Sorel boots by the door. Grandma is subscribed to Time magazine “to keep up with the current affairs” and rewatches Schitt’s Creek, but the words "your generation" and “back in my day” are used more often than good morning or good night.

And of course, there’s still that ridiculous wooden sign hanging above the fridge: Home is where breakfast is.

It’s dawn but still raining. It’s going to be another gloomy semi-dark day in Burnville. Even the flowery curtains over the kitchen window look sad. So do the storks on the wallpaper trim. In the summer, Central Pennsylvania is beautiful, but at this time of year, from fall to early spring, everything is a different shade of gray and gloomy, including people’s attitudes.

The only cheerful things in the house are my red-and-green plush socks that Grandma gave me for Christmas. She actually gave them to me in February when I moved here to take care of her. Gave them to me right before she updated me on her diagnosis, or the worst part of it—her cancer had taken an aggressive turn, yet she still declined chemo treatment. “And that’s that. Case closed. And I won’t discuss this.”

That’s Grandma. My grandfather passed from cancer, too. This is a vicious circle.

She didn’t want me to move back. “Nothing for you to do in this town.” It didn’t even dawn on me when she asked me to come for a visit what it was about. Until she said she needed to give me “instructions” about how to handle the estate after she’s gone.

“There’s no way around it. It’s time,” she said.

That’s when I realized that she didn’t have much time left.

I cried.

She only patted me on the shoulder. “It’s life.”

“It’s unfair, is what it is,” I sobbed, looking with teary eyes at the only family I had left.

“You’ll be all right, sweetheart.”

I push the on button on the coffee maker and start the batter for pancakes—anything to kill time and not think about the upcoming day or what it might bring. I suck at making pancakes, though making batter from scratch is easy if you follow Grandma’s recipe to a tee.

I hear the creak of the floor and the squeak of the door—of course, of all days, today is when Grandma gets up earlier than usual. She must’ve gotten up the same time as I did. These days, it takes her quite a while to get dressed, but she refuses help. She’s so stubborn.

She walks into the kitchen in her ironed blue pants, a knitted sweater over a white turtleneck, and slippers. Her hair is a beautiful shade of gray, thick and long, tied into a braid at the back and almost reaching her waist.

“I’m not planning on looking like a plucked chicken after all those chemicals they pump into me,” she said when they went through treatment options. “I’m too old for that stuff.”

She’s not even eighty. But again—stubborn. She loves her hair, too. She doesn’t care that I want her around longer.

“Is everything all right?” she asks without looking at me. She walks up to the counter and gently nudges me away. “Let me.” She takes the whisk from me. “You came in late last night,” she says in her monotonous voice. She doesn’t ask, she simply states the facts. “Didn’t turn on the light.”

See? It’s like she knows. Old people are like that. They look at you like they can see through you, and they ask questions so intuitively that it’s like they have surveillance on you.

“Yes. Everything is fine,” I say, pouring two cups of coffee. “Didn’t want to wake you.”

I realize that every move of mine is slow and careful today. Thievish. I feel like a criminal, though being a witness to a hit-and-run and fleeing the scene doesn’t make me one. Another thing I realize is that it’s not the crime per se that puts me on edge but the fact that it’s him. I didn’t know that man at all. He carried a faint sense of wrongness with him last night, though I can’t explain it.