little davey wakes up late for school, grandmama’s in the kitchen crying into the receiver of the phone. little davey likes to pick up the phone and put it down and pick it up and put it down. grandmama’s crying cause pa’s had an accident and little davey isn’t supposed to know. grandmama tells davey he better go catch the bus and little davey protests like: “dad drives me gran” and she covers the receiver with her hand and says run and catch it now, dave and so dave runs down the hallway and runs down the steps and steps out onto the road and waits for the bus. grandmama used to ride the bus.
now little davey looks at the cars and looks up and down the street for a bus stop, which he doesn’t see. the bus stop grandmama is talking about is in her hometown three states away and the town where davey now stands doesn’t have a school bus, but davey knows to listen. so he starts walking one way and figures it’ll pass him sometime and he’ll wave it down. little davey doesn’t know where his school is or what it’s called– it’s called school, and it’s where he goes every day after breakfast. this morning there was no breakfast and dad wasn’t there. sometimes things just don’t make sense and davey has figured out that it’s better not to ask about it. he’s figured out that if you do as you’re asked they don’t shout at you– or, less.
grandmama leans with her elbows on the counter and her tears and spit make a mess on her chin. the phone is dial tone on the counter and her grandson has lost his father and she has lost her son in law and her daughter has lost her husband– in this way it feels as if three men have died. on the phone they did not say he died but that he was gone, which made grandmama angry because she felt as if they were softening the truth because they believed her to be old and infirm and unsuited to hear normal harsh words and face normal harsh realities. she wanted– and if she weren’t so devastated, she would’ve– stumbled through a spiel on how at her age all a person comes to know are normal harsh realities.
when grandmama was younger but not young she did dishes in the kitchen while her daughter fixed her hair in the mirror before her first day of high school. her daughter’s name is stephanie but grandmama and pa call her steffie. and so grandmama calls out to steffie and says who’ve you got this year and steffie rattles off teacher’s names. and grandmama says mmhmm and thinks vaguely and towards the back of her brain about the lack of overlap between those names and the names she recited twenty years earlier at the same high school. she had gone to bed last night looking at the digital clock on her bedside table and its red numbers thinking about what advice she could give steffie like how ms wright always makes all the right answers on the first test “a”, just to fuck with you. if she were to tell this to steffie she would say “mess with” and not “fuck with” even though steffie had heard her swear on the phone and in the car. she wanted to keep up this act of mother and daughter.
davey walks and walks down the street while more and more lanes appear and one city bus passes by. little davey tries to wave it down but he’s very small and the driver couldn’t see him. he is now walking down a wide and fast street. he is only a few streets from home but his legs are very short and he has walked what feels like a mile, and a mile feels like an unbridgeable distance. little davey sits on the sidewalk and opens his lunchbox. little davey opens the metal container which normally holds his sandwich and finds the crust from the one he had yesterday, with little stains of jelly around the edge. davey starts to cry and then scolds himself, and then watches a crow for a little while.
steffie, who is also mom to davey and stephanie to her boss and steph to the man she talks to on the phone sometimes and visits every week or so when pa works late, is at work, and there she is stephanie. this morning she woke up very early, at five or so, and got out of the bed of the man who calls her steph, and gets on her bicycle and bicycles home in the fog. she returns home and shuts the door very slowly and softly until she hears the little mechanism inside the doorknob click. she takes a shower and changes into her work clothes. now it is six or so. for breakfast she takes a banana and an orange and a hard boiled egg and she gets in the car and drives to work and sits in the car in the parking lot for one and a half hours and doesn’t do or think pretty much anything at all. grandmama has yet to call her and inform her. when she walks in to where her desk is her coworker smiles at her and she doesn’t register it for a moment but by the time she turns to smile back he is walking away.
in the hospital on the other side of town the nurse assistant comes in to prepare the bed for the next patient. there are lots of people in the waiting room, some of them are crying and others are sleeping or cradling broken parts of their bodies. there was some blood on the floor by the bed which she mopped up. the nurses assistant is named mary and she is only eighteen. she wants to be a doctor. she mops up the blood and there’s a little part of a car key on the ground, which at first she can’t identify. it has some tissue stuff on it. she washes it off in the silver sink at the edge of the room and puts it in a biohazard bag, to maybe be returned to someone, or something. she doesn’t really know. this is one of those things they don’t really teach you but get angry when you do wrong.
the apartment where davey lives and where grandmama cries is a sad apartment with wall to wall carpets. grandmama has had her hand on the phone for a while because there is a call that she has to make but doesn’t want to. look– she takes her hand off the phone– now she puts her hand back on– picks it up– and then back on the hook. she sighs a heavy sigh that people sigh when they’ve cried for a very long time.
davey gets bored of the crow and plays with little pieces of rubber and broken glass. nobody has passed him on the sidewalk. his legs are starting to regain some strength. he gnaws on the crust of yesterday’s sandwich because he learned you can get so hungry you die and he wants to avoid this fate.
stephanie sits at her desk and turns on her computer. stephanie looks at her computer.
grandmama sits on the floor and breathes. then she lies on the floor, and breathes.
little davey finishes the crust of the sandwich. he looks in his lunch box to see if there’s anything else he forgot and finds only orange peels. davey throws them to the crows and gets back up, brushes his pants off with his hands, and starts walking again. he starts singing a song he learned at school about the colors of the rainbow.
grandmama says okay okay okay okay. she pauses, and then says again okay okay okay okay okay okay okay and she keeps repeating it as she pulls herself up, bracing herself on the edge of the counter, and walks to the other side of the counter and sits down on a stool and puts her hand on the phone. then she is quiet and she dials the number for steffie’s office.
little davey keeps walking on the narrowing sidewalk next to the widening street. he sings the song and sings it again: red, orange, yellow-green-blue, indigo, and violet too! he skips when he gets to “violet too”, just for a second, like to punctuate it. cars whizz past very close to him, and none of them are the bus.
stephanie sits in front of her computer looking at the blinking cursor where she types in the password. for some reason she’s having trouble remembering it. across the office she thinks she hears someone say “mom”, and she turns around, but it was nothing. she uncrosses her legs and recrosses them, switching which one is on top. her leg was falling asleep.
grandmama hears the phone ring twice and the receptionist says something and grandmama says “stephanie? is she in?” and the receptionist tells her it’ll be just one moment.
the nurses assistant takes her ten minute break in the room on the top floor with all the vending machines. she buys a mars bar with quarters and watches the tv, which is on silent. there’s a race in manhattan. there are monsoons in pakistan. the world’s oldest woman has just celebrated her one hundred and twelfth birthday. two residents are playing foosball on the other end of the room.
stephanie answers the phone. mom is on the other line. “mom?” steffie asks. she hears a sob. then mom says “honey, don died last night.” steffie asks, “what?”
the apartment has a broken window in the bathroom that dad patched with painters tape. nobody really ever talked about fixing it. when it rains, a little pool of water forms on the windowsill. the next day dad puts up more painters tape.
little davey keeps walking and singing. the sidewalk tapers out, and he keeps walking on the little shoulder of the road, next to all the whizzing cars. there are lots of large green signs overhead which davey cannot read. he walks around a curve in the road onto the highway shoulder, and leans out to see if he can see the bus.