Free Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home by Matthew Batt Page A

Green fields and putters. I said nothing.
    The words continued to wrap around the inside of my skull —
Do you know how long it’s been since I had sex?
—as though a teenager were toilet-papering my head.
    “No,” I said softly.
    He just shook his head.
    Shortly thereafter, my mom and Jenae showed up and the maitre d’ took us to a table with six chairs. My mom sobbed into a napkin while a busboy got rid of the extra chair.
     
    “It’s a sickness,” my mom had said. “He’s a sick man.”
    With Gram cremated, and me safely back in Salt Lake City, my mom began to tell me things. Some things that she had known. Some things that she was just discovering. Things that both of us could very well have gone without knowing.
    It all started the night when Gram got suspicious enough to pack my mom, twelve years old at the time, into her Buick and drive her all around Pekin looking for his bottom-of-the-line Porsche in the driveways of various women. Pekin was and is a small, chatty city, one where secrets were as poorly kept as they were prolific. My mom couldn’t get down low enough in the passenger seat.
    Now, she told me, there are at least three women.
    Ruth was sixty-something. She was a radiology tech back in Pekin. She lives with her daughter in Indianapolis, and while no one knows how long it had been since they’d seen each other, as soon as Gram died, Grandpa started talking to her and flying out to see her. They’ve been having an on-again, off-again affair for decades. Ten years longer, in fact, than I have been alive.
    Lorraine was in her seventies. Quite soon after Gram died, my mom decided Grandpa needed some age-appropriate company and tried to set him up with a few of her elderly neighbors and customers. Better than Ruth, she thought, who was about the same age as my mom. My grandfather went out with five or six ladies within a couple of weeks but found all of them, except Lorraine, boring and self-absorbed. “All they want to talk about is their goddamned angina,” he said. “You’re old,” he told them. “What do you want me to do about it?”
    And then there was Tonya.
    Tonya was a nurse’s aide who helped take care of Gram three days a week. This was in the last few months, when a squad of helpers settled into the condo. Nurses, nurses’ aides, social workers—they were all good women, all with empathetic eyes and pursed lips, but they turned my grandparents’ home into a kind of field hospital, and as much as we wanted them gone, their final absence would mean only one terrible thing.
    Tonya smelled like a bowling alley and had a swagger that was at once undermined and exaggerated by her scrubs, which had butterflies on them. The other nurses’ aides stayed busy and moved quickly, as if they might wreck the furniture if they lit upon it. After Tonya got Gram into bed, she’d plop down on the couch or on Gram’s own chair, kick her feet up on the coffee table, and reach for the bowl of nuts.
    “Jesus,” she’d say, “that’s a lot of work.”
    Tonya came to the funeral with her ex-husband/now-boyfriend. She wore a yellow dress fit for an Easter pageant, and the two of them gamboled through the narthex as though they were selling Fort Lauderdale time-shares. A week after the funeral, she started coming around again, at three in the afternoon, just like she used to, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
    “She says she’s worried about me,” my grandfather explained. “It’s just for a little while.”
     
    “She’s a goldbagger,” my mom said to me. “A golddigger—whatever. I don’t like it one bit.”
    It was May, and Gram had been gone a month, and I admitted to my mother that I didn’t like it either. “But he’s
Grandpa,
” I said, as if a de facto statement of his relation to me would at once describe and prescribe, render him back to the quiet elderly man who always had batteries for my toys, who laughed out loud at Victor Borge, a man for whom a foxtrot is