“Take this to Gramps. Careful. It’s hot.” Granny wraps the green and gray hot pad around the broken handle and hands me the tiny silver pot. “And don’t go drinking it. I know how much you love butter.” She cackles and turns her attention to the biscuit dough.

“I won’t drink it.” I stop in the doorway. “All the beer’s burned off now.”

Granny clicks her throat and flicks some of the sticky dough from her fingertips at me.

I kick the door shut and walk carefully to the fire pit where Gramps is building a pyramid of wood, pieces he’d collected out in the desert on his last four-wheelin’ trip. He balls up copies of last week’s Holtville Tribune and stuffs them in between the wood at the base. He walks around the pit, bends down to light each ball. A half-smoked Kool dangles from his lips, ash occasionally dribbling down his thin blue shirt. He hadn’t changed after work. The embroidered “Frank” on the circle patch is the only part that still looks fresh after all these years. Silkscreened across his back in Granny’s perfect penmanship: “Let Frank fix it!”

~

Gramps is a mechanic. His shop is the only one in town. All the church ladies bring their Buicks in for service. When I was little, Granny made me sit in the chair across from her desk in the office and read a book while she typed invoices and did her figures on the adding machine. But I grew restless and wandered over to Gramps. He taught me how to check tire pressure when I was five. In first grade, he let me climb up on a stool, wipe the dipstick, and put it back in to check the oil. When I was seven, he gave me a screwdriver and a carburetor. It took me about six months before I could take it apart and put it back together to his liking. Granny made me scrub all the grease outta my nails before we went home to make dinner.

~

Gramps stares into the flames. Their flicker reflects in his pale blue eyes. I know he’s thinking about my mother. His only daughter. He gets the same four lines between his eyebrows every time. He takes a long drag.

“She’s not gonna show,” I say.

“She might.”

“She never does.”

He looks in at Granny standing over a bowl of hot boiled potato pieces, smashing in a steady rhythm. “She might.”

I haven’t seen my mother since I was five. She stopped by a week after my birthday on her way to or from San Diego, I can’t remember. She gave me a pink flowered dress two sizes too small. Since then, she’s been postcards and birthday messages relayed through Granny. Her face is a blurry memory. I only know what she looked like because of the family photos hanging above the piano. Her toddler self in front of the Christmas tree surrounded by my uncles ages five, seven, nine, and ten. School pictures in two pigtails, some with missing teeth, always the same lopsided grin that showed off her dimple. Her at about 14 in a hot pink swimsuit with two uncles on either side standing on the shore of the Salton Sea. I don’t look anything like her.

Gramps finishes his cigarette and flicks the rest into the fire. He blows the kindling. Smoke moves into my face.

I blink hard, step back, and slosh a little sauce out the pot.

“Hey!” he scolds.

“Your fault.” I walk over to the barbecue grill and set the pot down on its shelf. Sweat drips down the side of Gramps’s open can of Schlitz. I take a sip.

He opens the grill and checks the coals. “If your Granny sees you...” He takes the can out of my hand.

~

There’s a lot Granny doesn’t see. By the time I get to Gramps’s shop after school now, she’s already finished the day’s invoices, gone home to watch her soaps and make dinner. She doesn’t know that Peter walks me to the corner of Pine and kisses me on the cheek outside 7-11, and then watches me walk down Fifth to the shop. Peter doesn’t dare get any closer than that.

Granny thinks I go to the shop so I can use her giant wooden desk to do my homework. Which I do. She expects straight A’s now that I’m in high school. I always leave a trail of adding machine tape for her to see in the morning, even when I don’t do math.

But really, I go to the shop to see Greg. He works for Gramps now that all my uncles have moved away. He has been pulling wrenches since he was 15 and I was barely in kinder. He broke up with his girlfriend right after I started wearing a bra last year. Coincidence? I think not.

Greg taught me how to change the timing belt on a Lincoln Town Car. My hands are small enough to mark the cogs without making a mess. His hands are twice as big.

But I can’t have a crush on Greg anymore. My best friend Patricia said he’s my dad’s cousin. How does she know who my dad is when I don’t? There are no photos of him with my mother. What I do know is that my dad was a soldier, went to Vietnam before I was born, and never returned. Not even in a body bag. Maybe he has a family there. Maybe I have a sister or a brother who speaks Vietnamese.

I asked after my dad once when I was about eight or nine, and Gramps threw the ice cube trays across the kitchen. He muttered curses and went outside for a smoke. Granny said some things are best left alone.

~

I collapse into one of Gramps’s lawn chairs. The webbing scratches the backs of my thighs; the metal bar under my knee is cold. When he sets down his beer, I pick it up for another sip. It’s warm. Gross.

Gramps turns the ribs and brushes both sides with beer and butter sauce. We only have these ribs and homemade biscuits on special occasions. Ribs and biscuits are my favorite. Granny has finished mashing the potatoes and starts making butter gravy, the kind everyone asks for at church potlucks.

“Don’t know why Gran goes through all this trouble,” I say. “Every. Damn. Time.”

“Watch your mouth.” He closes the grill and lights another Kool. Gets two beers out the back fridge.

I keep mine on the ground where Granny can’t see.

Gramps shuffles and deals me five cards on the wobbly metal TV tray between us.

I shift my chair so he can’t see my hand. Gramps cheats. I know from studying the red-backed cards in his hands that he has at least one Ace. That’s not cheating. It’s paying attention. Over the years, he has worried the corners of the Aces, never sure if he should go for the low straight or hold out for the high flush. I keep my three sixes. “I’ll take two.”

He grunts at me, sets his cards face down, and snaps two off the top of the deck. He gets up to turn the ribs over and brush them with beer and butter sauce again. Sometimes he uses this spicy mustard sauce that I don’t like. Sometimes, he says, that’s too damn bad.

I don’t look at my cards right away. Inside, the phone rings and Granny answers in her cheery voice, the one she uses when she has to call folks who owe Gramps money for a new transmission.

Gramps keeps only his Ace, takes four new cards, scowls at his new hand.

I watch Granny’s face through the kitchen window. Only one person can change her smile like that. She slams the receiver back into the cradle.

“At least she called this time.” I take a long pull from my can.

Gramps finishes his cigarette, drops the butt at his feet, then fans out his cards. “Pair of Jacks, Ace high.”

Granny slams the cabinet door as she puts one plate away and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She keeps talking to herself like she’d never hung up the phone. Silverware crashes as she opens and closes the drawer.

“Should you go check on her?”

Gramps grunts again. Beer in one hand, tongs in the other, he gets up to open the grill cover. “Ribs are ready.” He puts them on the empty cookie sheet, covers them with tinfoil.

I fan my cards out on top of his. “Full house.”

Granny lets the oven door close on its own. The bang startles her out of her rant.

We both stare at the back door.

I drink the last of my beer. “Think she’s gonna come out here?”

“Go help her bring the food.”

“Scaredy-cat.”

“Not scared. Smart. I’ve been dealing with all that since before you were born. Now it’s your turn.”

I get the small, almost empty pot of beer and butter sauce off the grill shelf. It’s cooling and has started to solidify a little at the edge. I lift the pot to my lips as I walk slowly toward the back door.

Granny ignores me, pokes the tops of her still-hot biscuits even though she knows they’re baked to perfection. They always are. Without an oven mitt, she tosses each one into a towel-covered basket and folds the corners over the tops of them so they’ll stay warm. 

I set the pot in the sink, put the hot pad back in the drawer where it belongs, and wipe my greasy lips with a paper towel. I also use it to cover my beer burp.

Granny’s still fussing with the towel, mumbles “ungrateful” and “irresponsible” and curse words I’ve never heard her say out loud.

I glance back through the kitchen window and shrug at Gramps.

He lights another cigarette and turns to brush the grill clean.

I hug Granny. Her whole body’s tense. It’s as if, after all these years, she expects my mother to be someone she’s not.

Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University and a PhD at USC. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and is spotlighted in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her YA novel, Breaking Pattern, is forthcoming with Inlandia Books. She is a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit. You can read her other work at http://tishareichle.com/