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“Ah-ha,” Willie said.
Roxie elbowed him. “Aren’t you sad? I mean, he’s the only friend you’ve got, right? Unless you’re friends with some of your fellow weirdos at that school. Which—” Roxie made a sad wah-wahh trumpet sound. “—is now closed, just like mine.”
“What will happen when he can’t go to the bathroom anymore?” Willie asked.
“Oh, he’ll keep going poop and pee until he dies. He’ll just do it in bed. He’ll have to wear diapers. Mom said they’d put him in a hospice, only they can’t afford it.”
“Ah-ha,” Willie said.
“You should be crying,” Roxie said. “You really are a fucking weirdo.”
“Grampa was a cop in a place called Selma back in the olden days,” Willie told her. “He beat on Black people. He said he didn’t really want to, but he had to. Because orders is orders.”
“Sure,” Roxie said. “And back in the really olden days, he had pointy ears and shoes with curly toes and worked in Santa’s workshop.”
“Not true,” Willie said. “Santa Claus isn’t real.”
Roxie clutched her head.
Grandfather didn’t last a year, or six months, or even four. He went down fast. By the middle of that spring he was bedridden and wearing Adult Pampers under a nightgown. Changing the Pampers was Sharon’s job, of course. Richard said he couldn’t stand the stink.
When Willie offered to help if she showed him how, she looked at him as if he were crazy. She wore her mask when she went in to change his diapers or give him his little meals, which were now pureed in the blender. It wasn’t the virus she was worried about, because he didn’t have it. Just the smell. Which she called the stench.
Willie kind of liked the stench. He didn’t love it, that would be going too far, but he did like it—that mixture of pee, and Vicks, and slowly decaying Grampa was interesting the way looking at dead birds was interesting, or watching the dead mole make its final journey down the gutter—a kind of slow-motion funeral.
Although there were two wicker chairs in Grampa’s room, now only one of them got used. Willie would pull it up beside the bed and talk to Grandfather.
“How close are you now?” he asked one day.
“Pretty close,” Grandfather said. He swiped a trembling finger under his nose. His finger was yellow now. His skin was yellow all over because he was suffering from something called jaundice as well as cancer. He had to give up the cigarettes.
“Does it hurt?”
“When I cough,” Grampa said. His voice had grown low and harsh, like a dog’s growl. “The pills are pretty good, but when I cough it feels like it’s ripping me up.”
“And when you cough you can taste your own shit,” Willie said matter-of-factly.
“Correct.”
“Are you sad?”
“Nope. All set.”
Outside, Sharon and Roxie were in the garden, bent over so all Willie could see was their sticking-up asses. Which was fine.
“When you die, will you know?”
“I will if I’m awake.”
“What do you want your last thought to be?”
“Not sure. Maybe the flag boy at Gettysburg.”
Willie was a little disappointed that it wouldn’t be of him, but not too. “Can I watch?”
“If you’re here,” Grampa said.
“Because I want to see it.”
