The sticker book cost nine dollars, and the girl at the drugstore register asked if it was for a birthday. I said no. I said it was for a boy I hadn’t seen since April. She gave me a sticker sheet free, a little green one with a volcano, and told me good luck.
I’m 68. I don’t usually need luck to visit my own grandson.
For two years after my Edmund died, Gavin came to me every Tuesday and Friday, straight from school. Then Derrick and Brianne stopped answering, and one text came from her: “Please don’t come by anymore.” Seven months of nothing after that.
So on Saturday I walked the twelve minutes to Linden Court. Brianne opened the door halfway, looked past the book, and told me, “Gavin doesn’t even ask about you anymore.” Then she shut it.
I was at the curb, deciding where to cry, when his window went up. “Grandma! Take it home and read it!” A paper plane wobbled down into the grass.
At home, in my coat, I unfolded it. Pencil capitals, pressed shiny: GRANDMA I’M SCARED AT NIGHT. PLEASE HELP ME. DON’T TELL MOM OR DAD. GAVIN
Sunday morning I took it to Alma, 72, who has lived next door to my son for eleven years. She told me about a gray pickup every Tuesday since spring, Brianne in her slippers at the driver’s window, shouting in the garage. That night I stood at her back fence under the maple Edmund planted, and Gavin told me through three inches of window that he hides in his closet with a flashlight.
Alma gave me the plate number on an envelope. On Monday I gave it to Vito, who was a deputy for thirty years and bowled with Edmund for twenty.
Wednesday at 7:40, he called back. Two prison stretches. Every Tuesday since April.
“The same month they shut you out.”
Vito’s Coat
I didn’t say goodbye. I said, “Come over,” and hung up on a man I’ve known since 1990.
He was at my door in nineteen minutes with his coat buttoned wrong. Vito is 66, and he still stands in a doorway like he’s checking it for something. He sat in Edmund’s chair without asking, which nobody does, and I let him, which I never do.
“His name is Chad Pruitt,” he said. “He sells pills. Oxy, mostly. The kind people get hooked on after a surgery and then can’t get from the doctor anymore.”
I thought about Brianne’s back. She’d had a disc done the winter before, right after Christmas. I’d brought soup. She’d thanked me in that voice people use for the mailman.
“Mom gets sleepy and funny after he comes,” I said. “That’s what Gavin told me.”
Vito nodded at the floor.
“And the shouting in the garage,” I said.
“Men like Chad don’t do favors. He fronts her a little, she can’t pay, it goes up.” He rubbed his face. “A buddy of mine still on the job says Chad’s been telling people somebody on Linden owes him close to four thousand.”
Four thousand dollars. I’ve bought a used car for less.
Then it came together, and I didn’t like how fast. When did that truck first come? Spring. When did I bring Gavin home? Tuesdays, five o’clock, right up that driveway with his backpack and whatever cookies we’d ruined.
“I’d have been standing on that porch,” I said. “Every Tuesday. Face to face with him.”
“You’d have asked who he was.”
“I’d have asked him for his mother’s phone number.”
Vito almost laughed. Then he didn’t.
“So they didn’t cut me off because of anything I did.”
“No, Halina.”
I had spent seven months going over every word I’d said that last winter. The comment about the screen time. The time I told Brianne her lasagna needed salt. I’d lain awake thinking I was a terrible woman who had lost her own grandson over noodles.
It was a drug dealer’s schedule.
I wanted to throw something. I picked up Edmund’s reading glasses off the table and held them instead, because they were what was there.
“What do I do,” I said. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“You don’t do anything. I make a call to a friend in narcotics, they sit on the house, they take Chad on a Tuesday.”
“And Gavin’s in his closet while they do it.”
He didn’t answer that.
“Derrick,” I said. “My son knows.”
“Your son’s been paying him, is my guess. The shouting? That’s a man who’s out of money.”
I called Derrick right there. Seven months of it ringing out. This time, because God has a sense of humor, he picked up on the second ring.
“Mom, it’s late.”
“I know about Chad Pruitt.”
Nothing. Then a door closing on his end, the sound of him going out to the garage.
“Who told you that?”
“Your son did. On a paper airplane.”
He breathed for a while like he’d run somewhere.
“Mom. You have to stay out of this. I’m handling it.”
“You’re handling it. He hides in a closet, Derrick. With a flashlight. You bought him that flashlight for camping.”
“She’s sick. She’s trying. If anybody finds out, they take him. You understand? They take him from both of us.”
“Somebody should.”
I heard it leave my mouth and couldn’t get it back. Vito looked up.
Derrick’s voice went very flat. “If you call anybody, you’ll never see him again. I’ll make sure. We’ll go to her sister’s in Ohio and that’s it.”
He hung up.
Vito stood and buttoned his coat right this time.
“Now he knows you know,” he said. “Thursday morning, that boy might be gone.”
Five-Twenty, Tuesday
I did not sleep Wednesday either. At this rate I’ll be sixty-nine before I’ve been unconscious again.
At seven Thursday morning I was across from their house in Vito’s Buick with a thermos. Derrick’s car was in the drive. So was Brianne’s. Gavin came out at 7:52 with his backpack, and Brianne walked him to the bus with her hand on the back of his neck the whole way, like a leash.
They hadn’t run. Not yet.
At nine I sat in a gray office downtown across from a woman named Riya Mehta, from Child Protective Services, who wore a cardigan with cat hair on it and did not smile once. I liked her immediately.
I put the plane on her desk. Folded back the way he’d folded it, because it seemed wrong to bring it flat.
She opened it and read it. Then she read it again, like Alma had.
“And you are?”
“His grandmother. I’m not supposed to be there.”
“Says who?”
“His mother. By text.”
I gave her all of it. Alma’s slippers, the garage, the fence, the closet, the plate, Chad Pruitt’s name, the four thousand, my son on the phone threatening Ohio. I had written it out the night before on my good stationery, the stuff with the lilies, because it was the only paper I had, and she took it without comment.
“Your neighbor will give a statement?”
“She’s waiting in the parking lot.”
Riya Mehta raised one eyebrow about a millimeter. “And the deputy?”
“Retired. He’s in the car with her. They’re arguing about the radio.”
She made two phone calls with her door shut. When she opened it, she said, “If this man comes Tuesday, we come Tuesday. Same time. Narcotics will take him in the driveway. I’ll be at the front door. We’ll need to see inside that house.”
“And Gavin?”
“Gavin goes somewhere safe that night. Do you have a bedroom?”
I have a bedroom with Edmund’s fishing tackle in it and a treadmill I use to hang blouses on. I said yes.
“Then we’ll talk about you,” she said.
Five days. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. I counted them like a kid before Christmas, except every one of them could be the day they loaded the car for Ohio.
Alma watched from her kitchen. She called me four times a day. “Car’s there.” “Car’s there.” “She took out the recycling in a bathrobe at two in the afternoon.” “Car’s there.”
Monday night Alma called at eleven.
“They’re packing,” she said. “A day early.”
My whole body went cold, the way it did when they called about Edmund.
“Chad?”
“No. Derrick’s car just left. With suitcases.”
I was at her back fence in eighteen minutes. I’m told I didn’t lock my door. His window was dark. I said his name. Nothing. I said it again and the curtain didn’t move, and I stood with both hands on that fence and I made a sound I did not know I had.
Then the window came up, three inches.
“Grandma, Dad took the suitcases to the car. He said tomorrow after the man comes we’re going on a trip.”
“Tomorrow after.”
“He said it’s a surprise.”
“Are you going on the trip?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s our surprise. Tomorrow when the man comes, you go in your closet like always. With your flashlight. You stay there until you hear my voice. Only my voice. Can you do that?”
“Will you come in the house?”
“I’m going to come in the house.”
He put two fingers out through the gap. I couldn’t reach them. The fence was too far. I put two fingers up anyway.
I called Riya Mehta at home at 11:40. She answered on the first ring, which I appreciated more than she will ever know.
“They’re leaving after the drop,” I said. “Ohio.”
“Then nobody’s leaving,” she said.
The Driveway
Tuesday, at 5:20 in the evening, the gray pickup turned onto Linden Court. Early, because I suppose even drug dealers want to get home for dinner.
I was in Alma’s front room with Alma and Vito. Alma had made coffee nobody drank. Vito had his hand flat on the window glass the whole time, the way you’d hold a dog back.
Two unmarked cars were already parked down the street. A woman in a cardigan sat in a third.
The truck pulled into the driveway. Brianne came out, in slippers, exactly as advertised. She went to the driver’s window. A hand came out. Hers went in.
And then everything happened very fast and very loud. Car doors. Men in vests. Somebody shouting “Hands, hands,” and Chad Pruitt, who turned out to be a skinny man with a ponytail and a sweatshirt that said GRANDPA’S FISHING BUDDY, which I will think about until I die, getting pulled out onto the concrete.
Brianne ran for the house.
I went out Alma’s door before Vito could stop me.
Brianne got to the porch. Riya Mehta was standing on it. Brianne pulled up short like she’d hit a wall.
Derrick came out behind her. My son. Forty years old, in his socks, holding a car key.
He saw the deputies. He saw Chad on the ground. Then he saw me crossing the lawn, the exact grass the plane had landed in.
“You,” he said.
Brianne turned around.
And she started talking. She talked and talked. I’d never heard her say so much in nine years of Thanksgivings.
“This is her. This is all her. She’s crazy, she’s been stalking us, she was in the yard at night, she’s been harassing my child, ask anybody, ask Alma, that woman’s insane, she’s been obsessed since her husband died, she can’t let go of anything, we told her, we told her nicely, Gavin doesn’t want her—”
“Ma’am,” said Riya Mehta, “open your hand.”
Brianne’s hand was a fist. She’d forgotten it was a fist.
She didn’t open it. A deputy did. A little plastic bag, little white pills, right there on Linden Court in front of the neighbors who’d come out on their porches. I counted seven of them. Neighbors, not pills.
“Those are prescribed,” Brianne said.
“From the window of a truck,” Vito said behind me. Calm. Like reading a bowling score.
Derrick hadn’t moved. The car key was in his hand.
“Mom,” he said. “Mom, please. Stop this. Tell them.”
“Tell them what?”
“That we’re fine. That it’s a misunderstanding. You can stop this. You can stop all of it.”
“Where were you going tonight, Derrick?”
He looked at the key.
“You let her send me a text,” I said. “Seven months. You let me think I’d done something. So nobody would see that man in your driveway.”
“I was protecting her.”
“Who was protecting him?”
Nobody answered. On the second floor, the window was dark.
“Where’s Gavin?” said Riya Mehta.
Brianne said, “He’s at a friend’s.”
Derrick said, “He’s in his room.”
They looked at each other. That look was the whole marriage.
Riya Mehta looked at me. I went past my son on his own porch. He put his hand out like he’d grab my arm, and his hand stopped in the air, and then he sat down on his front step and put his head on his knees and cried, loud, like he used to with the chickenpox.
The house smelled like stale smoke and something burned in a pan. There were pill bottles on the counter with other people’s names on them. I went up the stairs I had carried laundry up a hundred times.
His closet door was shut. A line of flashlight under it.
“Gavin. It’s Grandma.”
The door opened so fast it hit the wall. He had the flashlight in one hand and he came out of there and hit me around the middle so hard I sat down on his carpet. He’s eight and he’s heavy, and I didn’t care, and I didn’t let go, and he didn’t either.
“You came in the house,” he said.
“I said I would.”
Downstairs, Brianne was screaming my name. Not crying. Screaming it. The deputies were walking her to a car with her hands behind her and she was screaming that I’d done this, I’d ruined everything, I’d taken her son.
I carried him down past her anyway. I am 68 and it nearly killed me. His face was in my coat.
At the bottom of the steps, Brianne stopped screaming long enough to say it to his back.
“Gavin, tell her. Tell her you want to stay with Mommy.”
He lifted his head and looked at her a long second.
Then he said, “I asked about Grandma every day.”
The car door closed on her.
Derrick was still on the step. I stopped in front of him with his son on my hip.
“Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” I said, and walked past him to Riya Mehta’s car.
The Green Volcano
The judge gave me temporary custody that Friday. Ninety days to start, and then we’d see. It took eleven minutes in a little courtroom with a broken clock. Riya Mehta stood beside me and still did not smile, but when it was done she touched my elbow once.
Here is what happened to everybody, because I keep a list.
Chad Pruitt went back for his third stretch. They found two hundred and forty pills in that gray pickup, and the truck itself went to the county lot on a flatbed while half of Linden Court watched from the sidewalk. Alma took a picture. She’s had it printed.
Brianne was charged with possession and child endangerment. Her sister in Ohio didn’t come. Her lawyer took a plea, and the judge gave her a treatment program instead of jail, which I’ve decided I’m fine with on Mondays and furious about on Thursdays. She is allowed to see Gavin for one hour a week in a room with a caseworker watching. The first time, she asked him if Grandma said bad things about her. He said, “Grandma doesn’t talk about you.” Which is true. Riya Mehta wrote it down.
Derrick went into a rehab program two days after. That’s when I learned it wasn’t only her. He’d started taking them too, in the summer, “to get through it.” He paid Chad out of Gavin’s college fund. Thirty-one hundred dollars. He wrote me a letter from the place, on lined paper, the kind with the holes torn off one side. I saw that and had to put it down and walk around the block.
The letter said he understood if I never forgave him. It said he’d told Brianne in April that I’d see the truck and figure it out, because “Mom always figures it out.” He’d said that like it was a reason to lock me out instead of a reason to call me.
I haven’t written back. I will. Not yet.
The house on Linden Court has a sign in the front yard now. Derrick can’t pay the mortgage from where he is, and Brianne can’t pay anything. Alma tells me who comes to look at it. She is merciless about their shoes.
And Gavin lives with me.
Edmund’s fishing tackle went to Vito, who cried about it in my kitchen and pretended it was the onions I wasn’t cutting. The treadmill went to the curb. The blouses went in the closet where they belonged, and Gavin’s bed went where the treadmill was.
The first two weeks he slept with the flashlight on. I didn’t say a word about it. I bought him extra batteries.
The third week, I found it in the drawer of his nightstand, off.
He asks what I had for dinner, even though he was there. He asks every single night. I tell him every single night.
On the first Tuesday in December, I walked him home from school. Twelve minutes the other direction now, from his school to my apartment. He told me about a classmate named Shmuel who can burp the alphabet to M, and I said that’s nothing, your grandfather could do the whole thing, and he looked at me like I’d told him Grandpa could fly.
When we got upstairs, I put the dinosaur sticker book on the table. Nine dollars. I’d kept it in its bag since that Saturday. The free green volcano was still tucked inside.
He knew every long-necked one. He told me their names like I was slow.
Then he tore a page out of his school notebook, lined, holes and all, and he folded it. He folded it very carefully, and his tongue was out the corner of his mouth like Edmund’s when he did crosswords. He wrote something on it in pencil and wouldn’t let me look.
“Open the window,” he said.
I opened the window. Our street, the bus stop, Alma’s car pulling in below to bring us soup she claims she made too much of.
He threw it. It wobbled once, caught the air, and went down slow and white and landed nose-first on the hood of Alma’s car.
Alma got out, picked it up, and unfolded it right there on the sidewalk. She read it. She looked up at our window and put her hand on her chest.
“What did you write?” I said.
He leaned out next to me, both of us in the cold.
“GRANDMA’S HOUSE,” he said. “NOT SCARED.”
For more family tension and unexpected boundary-crossing, read about the water heater bill that never made sense and the birthday cards overshadowed by a handbag. There’s also a painful story about a child’s crutches left by the kitchen door.
