The Crossroads

About once every month, Billy O’Claire, the plumber, went to visit his grandmother at the nursing home.

Billy called his grandmother Mee Maw. He called the place where she lived the Smelly Old Folks Home because both were true: The home smelled and so did the old folks living inside it. The home smelled like mashed potatoes mixed with mop water. The old folks smelled like dirty diapers.

Billy pulled into the empty parking lot. This was no assisted-living retirement village. This was a cinder-block dump with weeds and cigarette butts in the gravel pits that used to be gardens. But it was the best the twenty-five-year-old plumber could do for his sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, even though the crazy old coot had raised him since he was a baby.

Billy had picked up a box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. Mee Maw loved them because they were soft and spongy and easy to eat without putting in her dentures.

Billy knew Mee Maw would be sitting in the cafeteria, so he headed that way. The vast room was quiet except for an old man plunking sour notes on a battered upright piano.

Billy saw Mee Maw sitting at a table far from the window. Mee Maw hated windows. She always thought somebody was on the other side, waiting to smash the glass and grab her.

“Hey, Mee Maw.” His grandmother’s white hair was flat across the back of her head, plastered in place by her pillow. Billy knew she spent most of her days in bed, staring up at the ceiling. She had lived that way most of her life. Alone and afraid.

“Who are you?” Mee Maw looked up from her tray when Billy sat down across from her.

“I’m your grandson. Billy. Remember?”

“Who?”

“Billy O’Claire.”

“That’s my name. O’Claire.”

“I know, Mee Maw.”

“My name is Mary. Mary O’Claire.”

“That’s right. I brought you oatmeal pies, Mee Maw.”

“How sweet. Be a dear and open one for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Billy pulled out a plastic-wrapped pie and tore into the wrapper with his teeth.

“He was here again. Last night.”

“Who, Mee Maw?”

“The man at the window. He says he’s going to kill me for what I meant to do.”

“Is that so?” Billy said it with the enthusiasm of someone who had heard the same story over and over, every day, his whole life.

When Billy was a baby, barely three months old, he had been sent to live with his reclusive grandmother. Maybe she wasn’t so bad back then. Maybe she even went outdoors. Billy couldn’t remember. He went to Mee Maw’s after his parents had been killed by a cop in what the newspapers called a “bungled blackmail scheme.”

“How’s your baby boy?” Mee Maw asked.

“Don’t know,” Billy answered sheepishly.

“You don’t know?”

“No, ma’am.” After the divorce, the judge gave Billy’s ex full custody of their baby boy.

Mee Maw shook her head. “Like father, like son.”

“I brought you some candy, too,” Billy said. “Bag of them mints you like. Maybe you can fling ’em at the window if the bad man comes back tonight.”

“Like father, like son.”

Billy rose from the table. It was time to go.

“I’ll see you next time, Mee Maw.”

He kissed his grandmother on the top of her head. He sometimes wondered why he bothered coming out to visit the old woman, but the answer was simple: Mee Maw was the only family he had.

Except, of course, for my son.

But his ex-wife, Sharon, wouldn’t let Billy anywhere near Aidan—no matter how many times he went over to where she worked to beg.

And Billy hated going to that place.

Spratling Manor gave him the creeps.