More Saving Scout

Andy could tell she regretted it as soon as she’d said it, but she didn’t apologize. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her now cold breakfast coffee nearly untouched in front of her, and she reached up one hand and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. Andy looked away, out the window over the sink at the back yard where he could see the skeleton of his old swingset by the trees that divided their yard from the neighbors’.

“That’s great, Mom,” he said, as sarcastically as he could manage. “Thank so much for sharing.”

“Andy,” she said, as he pushed his own chair back and got up, walked over to the sink. There was a red bird, a cardinal, at the top of the slide, which Andy hadn’t been on in years. Occasionally, he’d go out and sit on one of the swings if he needed to be alone, but the slide, no. It was yellow, falsely cheerful it seemed to him now, as he watched the bird fly out and up, over the row of pines.

“Forget it. I’m fine,” he said, walking out, leaving her sitting there with her head in her hand.

After helping his father get his grandfather settled, Andy walked out into the backyard, past the swingset, all the way to the pine trees. He sat in his favorite spot against the trunk of the largest one, where he could not be seen from the house. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. The rough bark dug into his skin, but he didn’t move. He wondered how long it would take his grandfather to die. To be honest, he didn’t even seem that sick, he seemed exactly the same as he had the last time Andy had seen him, about six months before, when his father had made them drive to New Jersey, where the facility was.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t,” his father had hissed to his mother through clenched teeth in the front seat of the car. Andy had almost said, “I’m not actually deaf,” but had decided against it. The tension was thick enough, and besides, he didn’t really care. He knew that his mother hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t quite get their thing, why she hated his grandfather so much, or what was so bad about his grandfather. It’s not like he was taking Andy to Yankees games or even asking about school or anything, but he was always friendly, polite. Andy had known from as far back as he could remember that the man had little interest in him, but he had his father’s parents, who were like television sitcom grandparents, seriously: rosy cheeks, candy dish, presents, lasagna and tossing the baseball around in the yard. It was almost too corny sometimes, but it was nice.

That visit had gone badly. After about ten minutes of sitting on a threadbare chair in the big open room full of other dying old people that smelled like citronella and vanilla and something much less pleasant all at the same time, Andy had stood up and walked out, and nobody had noticed, or at least nobody had said anything at the time. He’d walked out back where there was what the nurses called a “garden” but looked like a parking lot with a few also dying geraniums in cracked pots.

“I cannot believe how expensive this place is,” his mother had muttered one afternoon, looking over a bill or a brochure or something, and his father had said, ironically it turned out, “What? You’d rather have him come here?”

After another half hour or so, Andy’s mother emerged from the entrance, where Andy was sitting on the bench playing a game on his cell phone. He looked up; his father was behind her, and he shook his head at Andy in a kind of a warning, which Andy decided to take. He got up, and the three of them walked to the car in total silence, which lasted all the way back to Massachusetts, through three states, although his father found a terrible radio station, the kind where they played classical music and then talked about it in the most excruciating way possible, so there was at least some sound to cover the awful silence.

Later, lying in bed with the covers over his head, Andy had described the afternoon to his friend Mia, who called most nights once she knew he was almost asleep. It was a routine they had developed over the course of the previous year, and on the nights when she didn’t call, for whatever reason, Andy always fell asleep feeling vaguely unsettled, as though he weren’t sure what had happened to him had really happened without the opportunity to run it by Mia.