Two things: First, I haven't written creatively in quite some time. Please be kind. I just need to get back in the swing. Secondly, serious props to Wendryn for hooking me up. As a newbie, it was very helpful! Thanks, Wendryn!
Heat Advisory
It had been exactly five months since I’d last talked to my Grandma Esther when she died and fell down the stairs of her turn-of-the-century home in Trinity, Texas. It took a neighbor a little over a week before he went over to her house to find out why she hadn’t taken in her trash can. I wasn’t notified until three days later.
She was the only real family I had left, I cried to my girlfriend. Why couldn’t she just have let me love her? Marissa would just nod in that understanding way, and let me cry it all out. I knew why she couldn’t just let me love her. There were so many things between us: pride, anger, blame, guilt, and, of course, the generation gap. Then she died and none of it mattered. No one had won and, in fact, I had lost in a big way because I was all alone.
1987, Trinity
I rode my bike around Grandma Esther’s block over and over. Her home, built in 1888, was situated on an entire city block. The lot was dotted with ancient oak trees, trunks as big around as our breakfast table and shade as plentiful as the scent of jasmine in the air. It was summer, so my mother, father, and I were on our annual vacation to visit Grandma Esther. The other half of the summer would be spent at my aunts’ house in Oklahoma, but I was living in the moment, enjoying the humid, sticky Trinity summer.
The house was huge – two stories with an attic loft thing – but she had only three window unit air conditioners. One was in the kitchen, one in the master bedroom, and one at the end of the hallway leading to the other bedrooms. There were fans all over the house but it was always too hot. I preferred to sleep on the screened-in porch on the back of the house. The crickets were loud but the cicadas were the best. While others complained, I loved to fall asleep to the din of their vibrations, the sensation totally different than anything I experienced at home in Lafayette.
I hated the adult conversations that seemed to take hours as my parents sat in the bright, white kitchen. The piles and piles of antiquities in the basement were interesting but the rats kept me from venturing past the last step downstairs. The attic was just way too hot even though it would have made a great playhouse for me, but Grandma Esther had screwed the windows shut after my mother almost tumbled out one of them as a kid. I did a lot of exploring over the summers but there was a lot of time spent just riding my bike around her block, sometimes asking for permission to go a little further away. I was only 11 but I felt as if I had all the freedom in the world as long as I had the wind in my face. Without it, the sweltering humidity was stifling and dangerous.
Our last day in Trinity, right before we were to leave for Ardmore, there was a heat advisory for the area. The temperature was going to be 106 with the heat index and the city had set up ‘cooling centers’ for the old, the young, and the impoverished, or anyone else who was unfortunate enough to have no air conditioning. Head advisories were nothing new to Trinity. Every summer we had to endure one during our visit. Grandma Esther promised to keep herself hydrated. I remember looking out the back of our car and seeing her standing on her driveway, tall glass of pink lemonade in her hand, waving as we drove off down the street.
That was the last time I actually saw her under normal circumstances. Things got busy with my parents’ work and they just couldn’t take that much time off anymore. Split summer vacations turned into trading off destinations, which changed into every-other-year vacations. I missed Grandma Esther, but not her oven of a home.
Baton Rouge, 1997
I sat on the curb at the corner, waiting and waiting, but they hadn’t shown up yet. I was shaking even though it was probably ninety degrees and 95% humidity. I was sick, strung out, broken down and beaten. My parents were coming to save me. They were my last-ditch effort at rebuilding my life. My friends had turned their backs on me when I came close to overdosing – again. If I died in the house, then they would all get busted too and they didn’t want to take the chance, so I was out. I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to be one of those homeless teens with a first name only, disowned by their families. I wanted everything to be fixed again. I called my parents collect, spilled my guts, and they promised to come get me – right that very instant – so for me to just wait right where I was. I agreed to hold out for the hour and a half it would take, so I popped a squat and waited.
Four hours later, when they still weren’t there, I knew they’d changed their minds. I pictured it happening: Mom argued that they should leave me there, Dad argued that they couldn’t abandon me, Mom would remind Dad that they were supposed to be going on vacation the next day, Dad would tell her they could put it off for one more day, Mom would go through the laundry list of my transgressions, and Dad would eventually give in because, hell, my mother was simply a raging bitch. So I called collect again, ready to say last goodbyes, but nobody answered. I called every hour for the next twelve as I aimlessly wandered around the town, dehydrated and sweaty.
At ten the next morning, I called a childhood friend that lived near my parents’ house. Jennifer told me to call back in an hour and she’d have some news or she’d send some money by Western Union. When I called her back, she said nobody was home and that my dad’s car was gone. They always took my dad’s car if they went anywhere. She’d been calling their cell phones, but it was going to voice mail. Jennifer wired me money and told me to get on a Greyhound and come to her house.
Lafayette, 1997
The funeral was a blur. Barely 17 and I was an orphan. They hadn’t even made it out of the city. I was told they ran a red light and the car was t-boned by a beer truck. The fact that my father was still in AA made the whole situation funny to someone who was on the outside looking in. The truth still remains that my father won the argument and they died because he wanted to save me. My Grandma Esther was well aware of that fact too, and she didn’t let me forget it for not one minute during the funeral arrangements or the funeral itself. She told me I was never again allowed back in her home. We weren’t a big family. Everyone had either died or had remained childless. I was alone in every way and out on the streets by myself – forced out, this time.
Jennifer’s family took mercy on me and let me stay with them. Eventually I found love and moved in with Marissa. She helped me find my center and find some stability both financially and emotionally. She convinced me to not give up on my Grandma. So I kept calling when I felt strong enough to deal with the guilt trip and the cursing. We had one decent conversation, right up to the point where I told her about Marissa. She hung up on me after muttering something about going to hell and a disgrace on the family name. I just didn’t think I needed to lie about my relationships but I suppose she wasn’t expecting to find out the truth.
Trinity, 2009
I kept picturing her tumbling down the stairs, bumping stair after stair headfirst, on the way down to the landing before the basement that frightened me as a child. I never did ask what had happened exactly and Marissa had asked them not to offer an explanation. None of the details mattered. The one thing they did tell me was the cause of death: heat stroke.
Grandma Esther was a pigheaded, stubborn, angry woman. She ignored the heat advisory – again – and it killed her. She probably had refused to believe that a woman of her age needed to be more mindful of her health and its limitations. I wish it hadn’t happened but sometimes you just have to accept the truth, adapt to your new reality, and move forward.
As for me and Marissa, we’re moving to Colorado. I’ve heard they have nice weather.
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