Buried beneath Grandpa’s sagging flesh was a man desperate to break out of it. He opened a fresh pack – unfiltered – and fished out a cigarette.
“Maybe you will be the one, hmm?” he said and then lit the tip with a match. Tony watched from behind strategically placed hair that hung down over his face with a kind of practiced apathy.
“Hook it up, Grandpa,” he said, reaching for the pack.
“You know you Grand mama would never allow that,” he said while tucking the pack into his left pocket.
“Psh.” Tony whipped his head to the right to get the hair out of his eyes and then slouched back into his chair, folding his arms.
“Not like she’s gonna know now anyway,” he said.
Grandpa pressed his bottom lip against the top one. He scratched the top of his bald head.
Outstretched before them was another gorgeous night. In Texas the summers can be unbearable but at night the humidity slept and being in Galveston they enjoyed the cool, lulling breeze from the ocean.
“What kind of clothes do you call those?” Grandpa asked while inhaling the smoke.
Tony wore baggy black pants with silver zippers all over. His shirt, two sizes too small, clung to his undersized chest and had the word “Rebel” printed across it in blood red. He had a dog collar around his thin neck and a thick leather bracelet around his right wrist.
“It’s industrial Grandpa, don’t you know anything?”
Grandpa’s cheeks drooped, his gentle gaze remaining on his grandson.
“Who are you rebelling against?”
Tony rolled his eyes and whipped his head to the right again.
Grandpa set his cigarette in the ashtray and looked imploringly at the teenage boy across from him.
“I know that when you Grand mama and I met it was amore a prima vista.”
Tony shook his head and stared up at the ceiling.
“Josephine. When I first saw her I thought I was in heaven.”
“There’s no such thing as love at first sight, Grandpa.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, I’ve told you like five times already.”
“I’m sorry. The older I get the harder it is to hold on to things, they start to slip away.” Grandpa looked at the wall behind Tony at the pictures he had tacked up over the years.
“Is she pretty?” Grandpa asked.
“Yeah,” Tony looked down. “I don’t know what she’s doing with me.”
Grandpa laughed and patted Tony’s leg.
“We never do, Tony. We love women because they put up with us.”
Tony nodded.
“I miss Grandma too, you know.”
Grandpa lit another cigarette.
“Sometimes I wish I could talk to her. I never had a chance to tell her anything.” Tony chewed on his bottom lip, his hard stare fixed on the cement ground.
“I talk to Josephine all the time. I tell her not to be lonely. I tell her, her Wiley will be there soon.” Grandpa paused and took a hard drag off his cigarette and then broke into a fit of rattled coughs. “You can talk to her too.”
“Grandma’s gone, Grandpa,” Tony said.
“She visits me all the time, sometimes in my dreams and sometimes in the living room.”
“That isn’t real,” Tony said. He stood up and walked to the wall where the pictures were and studied them. Three generations of family on one wall.
“I’m going to go to bed now.” Grandpa stood up, his frail body unsteady. He shuffled towards the kitchen door and disappeared inside. Tony stayed up the next few hours looking at all the pictures.
