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

damned near reckless.
    I was supposed to be the smart one in the family. My mom wanted to know now what everything meant. And because you can only say “I don’t know” for so long, I did what I have done most of my life: made shit up.
    “We’re all dealing with loss in our own ways, Mom,” I said. My voice was draped in tweedy condescension. I was a teacher, a doctoral candidate; I knew what I was talking about. I was
smart.
    But that was bullshit. There are times when communication should be illegal, subjects absolutely forbidden. This was certainly one of them, and I’m using it here as a dramatic expository backdrop for my own life story. I didn’t know what to do then, and I don’t know what to do now, but we need to believe in something—if not our actual lives as they are lived, then at least the stories we can distill from them.
    But to my mom I talked about pain the way Kant talked about music, which is to say, briefly and without regard to the fact that it has its own life, its own categorical imperatives.
    “Think about it, Mom,” I said. “He’s displacing all the energy and time and life he had put into caring for Gram into something new, something that makes him feel necessary again. It’s a terrible thing,” I told her, “to feel useless.”
    It is true, what I said. It is false.
    “I know, Matt,” she said. “Jesus Christ, do I know.”
     
    My mom kept setting Grandpa up with her golf-league widows, and one by one my grandfather dismissed them to their knitting. All the while he was flying back and forth between Milwaukee and Indianapolis to see Ruth. Tonya was “stopping by” who knows when or how often, except that the crystal ashtray on his coffee table, usually filled with peanut M&M’s, was lately choked with cigarette butts, and the recycling bin in his garage was overflowing with cans of domestic beer he never drank.
    Meanwhile, his doctor expressed some concern over Grandpa’s prostate, and he had been scheduled to undergo radiation therapy in lieu of surgery. I was useless in Salt Lake, but my mom was confident it would turn out to be a good thing.
    “I know it’s terrible,” she told me, “but I think it’s what we need. It’ll knock some sense into him. And he won’t be able to take care of himself, so I will, and I promised Gram—she made me
swear
—that I wouldn’t put him in a home. I said I’m going to take care of him,” she said, “and that’s what I’m going to do.”
     
    One day in June, I found myself talking to my grandpa on my cell phone. I was driving on 11th Avenue, well above the Salt Lake Valley floor, and that day it smelled of sulfur and smoke and the air was a hazy yellow-brown from a wildfire north of Bountiful, where I taught a class. Heretofore in my life, wildfires were what happened in wildest Montana or in the thankless San Bernardino Mountains. They were wilderness fires. They weren’t supposed to sneak up on you while you were commuting to work.
    “Well, I guess you should know,” Grandpa said without preface or segue. “The big news here is that Tonya and I are pretty serious.”
    This was six, maybe seven weeks after Gram died.
    It was over a hundred degrees. My truck was already near overheating, the air was the color of punishment, and my grandfather was telling me something about a woman who eats cigarettes and shoe leather.
    “What does that mean?” I asked. “‘Serious.’” There was a stop sign. It made sense. I knew what I was supposed to do.
    “Well,” my grandpa said, terse and cornered. “I guess it means that we care an awful lot about each other, Matt.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know that I understand.”
    I had always fancied myself a pretty empathetic guy. A writer. A waiter. A teacher. Someone who knew how to listen and let people know that I was listening without being ostentatious about it. At this moment, the sonic experience of my listening must have sounded like a needle bouncing and