The house is rotting. The front porch sags to the ground like it’s taking some kind of woeful last curtain call. I never considered this place my father’s, and I don’t now consider it my own – although the reverse mortgage and lien are apparently dad’s final legacy to me. In my mind, this house will always be Gram’s.
***
“Did you get yours?” my grandmother’s voice croaked from the receiver.
“This is our year.” Mom would promise her mother-in-law while twisting the long green phone cord around her finger and surveying the contents of a fat orange Publishers Clearing House envelope. “One of us is finally going to hit,” she’d say, taking a drag on her Virginia Slim and blowing the smoke out the screen door.
When Mom first got hooked on the notion of winning, Dad threatened to throw her out if he ever caught her ordering anything. Still, I was certain our life would be better with sharper knives, brighter flashlights, and collector’s sets of vintage money, and I figured Dad would come around when Ed McMahon knocked on the door. It was hard not to believe in the coming of McMahon, the way my Gram carried on. She bought almost every magazine and talked about winning non-stop.
“You don’t have to subscribe to win!” my father often scolded his mother, to no avail. Dad hadn’t had a steady job since he got laid off by the pulp mill, and he must have resented Gram spending what he saw as his rightful inheritance. He was constantly rolling his eyes at the piles of magazines, from National Geographic to The National Enquirer, that covered every surface of her house. My Grandmother hadn’t traveled much, but the magazines were her ticket to explore.
The day after I turned thirteen, Mom and I were over at Gram’s house. It was a warm spring night, and you could smell the lilacs blooming. We were all kind of edgy because we knew it was right around the time when they’d be walking around with those oversized checks. Then, all of a sudden, Dad came racing through the backyard yelling like there was some kind of fire. Our house was two blocks behind Gram’s, and we heard his shouts before we saw him. “Y’all come quick! You need to get back to the house this minute, Pauline.” He was panting hard. “There’s a camera truck that just pulled up.”
Gram and Mom froze. Their rockers stopped mid-rock. Then they both jumped up like they’d been stung and practically threw themselves down that porch’s four little stairs. Normally, someone would have held Gram’s hand. She was nearing seventy-six with a bad hip, but you wouldn’t have known it right then. To watch her flying across those backyards and down those red clay trails that cut between the little row houses of our neighborhood, anyone might have thought she was an Olympic athlete.
As we neared our house, I could see Mom looking up and down the road, her head swiveling like a weather vane in a storm. By that point, Gram had faltered, and I was doing my best to hold her steady. A whistle came from her lungs and the spidery veins in her cheeks pulsed under pale, wrinkled skin.
“Pauline, where they at?” she yelled, still trying to catch her breath.
Mom checked our porch before tearing off again up the street and out of sight. We heard her screaming somewhere down the block, “We’re here! The Jenkins family is here!” and Gram and I joined in, adding our voices as I half carried my grandmother toward the front. “We’re here!” Gram was sweating. Rivulets plastered her white hair to her forehead and a wet V had formed at the top of her peach blouse.
“Shit, I hope we didn’t miss them,” Mom said as she walked back toward us, hands on hips.
“They won’t leave if we’re the winners.” Gram tried to sound optimistic, but she looked wrung out. She flopped down on the front steps of our porch. And, just then, my dad came round the corner, laughing and pointing.
“You should have seen your faces! Y’all actually believed you won something. How gullible can you get?” He was bent over laughing. It was the first time I noticed the beginnings of a bald spot on his head and I remember thinking: Good. I hope that asshole loses every last strand of hair. That was my final thought before Gram collapsed.
They weren’t sure if she had the stroke then or later that night, but Gram was never the same after. Mom wanted to get her a full-time nurse, but Dad was too cheap for that. He said we could handle Gram, even though the only time he visited was to clear her place out—throwing away pile after pile of her prized magazines.
***
The front room is bare, Dad’s Lazy-Boy the last lone occupant. Staring at the empty chair, I wonder what would have happened if we’d actually won the sweepstakes. Would Mom have left Dad sooner? He’d never been part of our dream, but his reluctance might have been his greatest cruelty. As Gram always said: “You can’t win if you don’t believe.”
