The three of us headed back to my house. They didn’t want to leave me alone, and I was glad. I really couldn’t be alone. They made themselves at home, and I dumped my stuff on the kitchen table as I always did. There, a stack of bills sat on the dining room table. Gran usually left bills and announcements out for me to see when she found them too overwhelming or was unable to pay. They were old hospital bills for procedures she had done last year. She never paid them, and now the hospital was threatening collections.
Ironically, the total sum was almost two thousand dollars. My heart sank. At least my ridiculous tip from the overspendy movie billionaire would cover the unpaid amount. I was hoping to put the tip money away for Parsons. I let the disappointment wash over me. I didn’t want bill collectors beating down my door, so I was happy I had the money to pay, despite my disappointment.
I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I just sat on the couch and stared at the wall. Ricky whipped out his cell phone and ordered pizza. Tammy snooped through our cupboards and found some whiskey.
“Hey, Ricky, have them send over a six-pack of coke with the pizza,” Tammy yelled.
“Damn girl, you’re thirsty,” he whisper-shouted while he waited for the person on the other line.
“It’s not for me, dumbass. I found a whole bottle of Jack, so we’re gonna get our happy on tonight!” She laughed as she waved the mega-sized bottle of Jack Daniels in the air. “What’s Gran doing with a big ol’ bottle of whiskey, Cat?” Tammy’s face was a mix of condemnation and gratitude.
“It’s good for colds,” I answered in a monotone.
She snorted. “Oh, I bet it is. It’ll knock a little lady like Gran clean out.”
“Yeah…two large pepperoni pizzas,” Ricky confirmed.
“Have them add some jalapenos to one of them,” Tammy yelled to Ricky.
“Oooh, no,” Ricky refused, then sighed, “add a small pizza with pepperoni and jalapenos. Yeah, that’s all we need. Okay,” he said as he ended the call.
“I swear you are the least Latino Latin guy I’ve ever known,” Tammy teased. “I thought they put jalapenos in your baby bottles back there in Puerto Rico.”
Ricky shook his head. “No, jalapenos are way too spicy for me. They give me indigestion.” Ricky rubbed his stomach for emphasis.
We moved our party out onto the porch, but I still felt like a zombie. Even after the pizza came and we started drinking the whiskey and coke, I couldn’t shake the feeling of numbness. It helped when we began remembering our lives together, each telling fun stories about Gran. Tammy and I spent most of our lives together, and neither of us had left the neighborhood. While she didn’t live with her parents anymore, she had an apartment nearby. She was going to school to become an engineer and worked at a local engineering firm.
“You remember the day Gran came and got us out of school?” Tammy asked, having already had a few whiskey cokes.
“Oh my god, we thought we were so busted.” I smiled, remembering back to the day that Gran taught us a lesson we never forgot.
Tammy feigned hitting a baseball. “Still can’t believe that ball went through Gran’s bedroom window. And that poor frosted-pimple lamp.”
“I hated that lamp. It was so ugly, like a bulbous mutant from outer space. I swear it was gonna come alive one day and use its bumpy surface to eviscerate me.” It was terrifyingly ugly, but it was Gran’s favorite.
“We just stashed the broken pieces away, and you came over to my house for dinner.”
I remembered feeling like Tammy saved my life that day. “Right, we never told her what we did, then Principal Jaffrey calls us into his office and there she is looking all pissed off.”
Tammy laughed. “She looked like a little red fireball that was about to explode all over us!”
“We didn’t say a word to each other. She drove us to the train station, and I swore she was gonna just put us on a train going anywhere away from her.” I recalled the panicky feeling of thinking she was sending us away forever.
“And I was like ‘what’s wrong Ms. Eula, what are we doing? Does my Momma know you got me?’ I was pissing myself,” Tammy recalled.
I mimicked Gran’s expression. “She was like… ‘oh, she knows.’”
Tammy held her stomach. “I was shitting.”
“Then she got on the train with us and just looked out the window and didn’t say anything. I remember feeling so sick I almost threw up.” I took another big swig of whiskey and coke.
“Didn’t I throw up? I’m pretty sure I did. I went to the bathroom and just puked up my PB&J and chips.” Tammy was starting to slur her words a little.
“The ride was so long I thought we were going to hell,” I added for dramatic effect.
“Wait, was this the time Gran took you all to the theater?” Ricky chimed in, also getting a bit drunk.
“Yup,” Tammy answered, “we ended up at the 72nd Street subway station after, like, hours.”
“She bought us tickets to Cats, and we sat in almost the back row,” I remembered.
“Oh my god,” Tammy chimed in, “then…”
“’MEMORY!’” we said together.
“She’s like balling her little brains out when this raggedy cat comes out and sings this ‘Memory’ song, and we’re all sitting there just snotting ourselves, crying…” Tammy was tearing up.
“After the song, Gran emotionally sucker punched us,” I told Ricky. “She told us she found the lamp we broke and wasn’t angry, but the lamp was her memory. Harold, her husband, had bought the lamp for their shitty little dump of an apartment and it was all he could afford, but it made her feel like she was a queen in a castle.”
“It was from the 1940s, and you know her husband died of this horrible disease, and she felt like he was near her when she turned it on.” Tammy was drunk but trying to sound somber.
“We just couldn’t stop apologizing to her. She eventually told us that we mattered more than the lamp. Living people were more special than things. She had actually planned on cutting us from school long before we broke the lamp, but she decided to use the lamp as an opportunity to teach us about honesty,” I said quietly.
“I’m not shitting you, I haven’t lied since,” Tammy confessed.
“Neither have I.”
“I remember she got us ice cream on the way to our hotel. God, it was so much fun. Even though the play was a little boring, the whole experience was priceless. We got to sleep in a hotel and had this amazing breakfast at a cafe in New York. Hell, who does that?” Tammy’s voice cracked. “Who the hell does that? I don’t know, Cat. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to say goodbye to her.”
I burst into tears. We hugged, our feelings huge and overwhelming. Although Ricky was crying, he was desperately trying to steer us in another direction.
“Well, I’ve got a story that’ll have you drying up those tears,” Ricky blurted out.