The Sky is Everywhere(14)
Author: Jandy Nelson

A little while later, a stoned Big drifts past my open door. He’s been smoking so much weed that when he’s home he seems to hover above Gram and me like an enormous balloon – every time I come upon him, I want to tie him to a chair.

He backtracks, lingers in my doorway for a moment.

“I’m going to add a few dead moths tomorrow,” he says, as if picking up on a conversation we’d been having.

I nod. “Good idea.”

He nods back, then floats off to his room, and most likely, right out the window.

This is us. Two months and counting. Booby Hatch Central.

The next morning, a showered and betoweled Gram is fixing breakfast ashes, Big is sweeping the rafters for dead moths to put under the pyramids, and I am trying not to make out with my spoon, when there’s a knock at the door. We freeze, all of us suddenly panicked that someone might witness the silent sideshow of our grief. I walk to the front door on tiptoe, so as not to let on that we are indeed home, and peek through the peephole. It’s Joe Fontaine, looking as animated as ever, like the front door is telling him jokes. He has a guitar in his hand.

“Everybody hide,” I whisper. I prefer all boys safe in the recesses of my sex-crazed mind, not standing outside the front door of our capsizing house. Especially this minstrel. I haven’t even taken my clarinet out of its case since school ended. I have no intention of going to summer band practice.

“Nonsense,” Gram says, making her way to the front of the house in her bright purple towel muumuu and pink towel turban ensemble. “Who is it?” she asks me in a whisper hundreds of decibels louder than her normal speaking voice.

“It’s that new kid from band, Gram, I can’t deal.” I swing my arms back and forth trying to shoo her into the kitchen.

I’ve forgotten how to do anything with my lips but kiss furniture. I have no conversation in me. I haven’t seen anyone from school, don’t want to, haven’t called back Sarah, who’s taken to writing me long e-mails (essays) about how she’s not judging me at all about what happened with Toby, which just lets me know how much she’s judging me about what happened with Toby. I duck into the kitchen, back into a corner, pray for invisibility.

“Well, well, a troubadour,” Gram says, opening the door. She has obviously noticed the mesmery that is Joe’s face and has already begun flirting. “Here I thought we were in the twenty-first century…” She is starting to purr. I have to save him.

I reluctantly come out of hiding and join swami seductress Gram. I get a good look at him. I’ve forgotten quite how luminous he is, like another species of human that doesn’t have blood but light running through their veins. He’s spinning his guitar case like a top while he talks to Gram. He doesn’t look like he needs saving, he looks amused.

“Hi, John Lennon.” He’s beaming at me like our tree-spat never happened.

What are you doing here? I think so loudly my head might explode.

“Haven’t seen you around,” he says. Shyness overtakes his face for a quick moment – it makes my stomach flutter. Uh, I think I need to get a restraining order for all boys until I can get a handle on this newfound body buzz.

“Do come in,” Gram says, as if talking to a knight. “I was just preparing breakfast.” He looks at me, asking if it’s okay with his eyes. Gram’s still talking as she walks back into the kitchen. “You can play us a song, cheer us up a bit.” I smile at him, it’s impossible not to, and motion a welcome with my arm. As we enter the kitchen, I hear Gram whisper to Big, still in knight parlance, “I daresay, the young gentleman batted his extraordinarily long eyelashes at me.”

We haven’t had a real visitor since the weeks following the funeral and so don’t know how to behave. Uncle Big has seemingly floated to the floor and is leaning on the broom he had been using to sweep up the dead. Gram stands, spatula in hand, in the middle of the kitchen with an enormous smile on her face. I’m certain she’s forgotten what she’s wearing. And I sit upright in my chair at the table. No one says anything and all of us stare at Joe like he’s a television we’re hoping will just turn itself on.

It does.

“That garden is wild, never seen flowers like that, thought some of those roses might chop off my head and put me in a vase.” He shakes his head in amazement and his hair falls too adorably into his eyes. “It’s like Eden or something.”

“Better be careful in Eden, all that temptation.” The thunder of Big’s God voice surprises me – he’s been my partner in muteness lately, much to Gram’s displeasure. “Smelling Gram’s flowers has been known to cause all sorts of maladies of the heart.”

“Really?” Joe says. “Like what?”

“Many things. For instance, the scent of her roses causes a mad love to flourish.” At that, Joe’s gaze ever so subtlety shifts to me – whoa, or did I imagine it? Because now his eyes are back on Big, who’s still talking. “I believe this to be the case from personal experience and five marriages.” He grins at Joe. “Name’s Big, by the way, I’m Lennie’s uncle. Guess you’re new around here or you’d already know all this.”

What he would know is that Big is the town lothario. Rumors have it that at lunchtime women from all over pack a picnic and set out to find which tree that arborist is in, hoping for an invitation to lunch with him in his barrel high in the canopy. The stories go that shortly after they dine, their clothes flutter down like leaves.

I watch Joe taking in my uncle’s gigantism, his wacked-out mustache. He must like what he sees, because his smile immediately brightens the room a few shades.

“Yup, we moved here just a couple months ago from the city, before that we were in Paris—” Hmm. He must not have read the warning on the door about saying the word Paris within a mile radius of Gram. It’s too late. She’s already off on a Francophiliac rhapsody, but Joe seems to share her fanaticism.

He laments, “Man, if only we still lived—”

“Now, now,” she interrupts, wagging her finger like she’s scolding him. Oh no. Her hands have found her hips. Here it comes: she singsongs, “If only I had wheels on my ass, I’d be a trolley cart.” A Gram standard to forestall wallowing. I’m appalled, but Joe cracks up.

Gram’s in love. I don’t blame her. She’s taken him by the hand and is now escorting him on a docent walk through the house, showing off her willowy women, with whom he seems duly and truly impressed, from the exclamations he’s making, in French, I might add. This leaves Big to resume his scavenging for bugs and me to replace fantasies of my spoon with Joe Fontaine’s mouth. I can hear them in the living room, know they are standing in front of The Half Mom because everyone who comes in the house has the same reaction to it.