Free Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson Page A

you’re a good dog, yas sure, yas you are. Sure, that’s a good dog, down, go down, yas. At’s a good Handy, yas.”
    She paused for breath every few seconds on the stairs and I heard her hand clasp the banister. “Are you asleep?”
    “No.”
    “Are you too warm or too cold?”
    “No.”
    “I can get you a blanket.”
    “No thank you. I’m fine, Gramma.”
    She lowered herself slowly, the boards creaking under her, to her knees. She poked her elbows in on the bed and said a prayer. From across the room, it was just words. Then she rattled her pan under the bed and crawled in.
    “Well, it does feel good to be in B-E-D.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, good night then.”
    “Night.”
    When my grandmother said I love you, which she did only rarely, she waited a long time in the dark. Time enough passed so that I stopped waiting for it, and I would be almost asleep and then she said I love you in an unwavering, normal voice. I thought she said it that night. But I didn’t really know if I heard it or not, I could have been asleep, dreaming, so I never answered. My grandmother was so shy.
    The next morning, when I woke up, I heard her moving around the kitchen, getting pans out of the oven drawers. Wind was blowing upstairs near my bed, branches were beating against the walls. The crackling sound of the radio came up through the floor. It was dark out the windows. I woke up hours earlier than I ever did at home. My grandmother cut a piece of buttered toast into four squares and arranged them around a yellow scrambled egg. My grandmother’s eggs came out the way they were supposed to, not like my mother’s. At home, we each made our own breakfast. We spread steak tartare on toast or stood at the open refrigerator and ate cold chateaubriand. My mother cooked the steaks at night and Ted sliced them, so we’d always have protein in the house. The kitchen in my grandmother’s house was old-fashioned, with pale yellow cupboards and mint green trim. At home we had all the modern features. But I was more comfortable here at my grandmother’s. Still, I didn’t know if I would have wanted it to be my house.
    The radio was on and there was a storm. We thought of driving up to Lake Superior for the washups. My grandmother and I collected rocks. We’d found minerals and geodes in caves and cracked them open ourselves. When my grandmother took her European tour she brought a chisel and came home with rocks from all the famous places. She wrapped them in colored tissue paper and taped labels to the bottoms on the airplane. Rock from the Acropolis, Rock from Pillar of the Coliseum, Rome. Sometimes we drove to small Indian towns around Bay City for their museums. We’d met rock hounds, old women with pointed sneakers and no socks, their skin gathering at their ankles in tiny foldslike nylons, on Lake Michigan, bending over the gray sand, looking for petoskeys.
    “Well, should we call your ma?”
    “She’s not up yet.” I was looking at the big round clock over the refrigerator. In the new house, we had to go wandering around to alarm clocks to see if one had the right time. I’d dig Ted’s watch out of his pocket in the closet. There was a tiny black traveling alarm by my mother’s bed. She slept with one arm draped over it.
    “We could call her from up there, I suppose. ’Course then what can she say?”
    “Can we take Handy?” I asked. My grandmother got Handy the way she’d gotten all her dogs; Handy was our dog first. I’d wanted a dog because I had a crush on our morning paper boy. I used to take the garbage out when I saw him coming up Carriage Court. But I thought it would look more natural to be walking a dog. After a while, though, my mother decided I wasn’t taking good enough care of Handy and besides, he made a mess. She decided that the dog needed more room to run, so we gave him to my grandmother. My grandmother fussed, saying, Oh, I don’t want another dog, what do I want a dog for? Handy was the name