by Jeff Zentner
He brightens. “Sure, dude. Let’s go.”
We go and eat lunch. He shows me his YouTube page. I tell him about my stories. We laugh.
We laugh a lot, actually.
There was probably some period when we weren’t best friends and inseparable. Days. Maybe weeks, even. But in my memory, from that day on we were as good friends as we’d ever be. It’s funny how memory cuts out the boring parts. And that makes it a good story editor. Sometimes, though, you want to remember every minute you spent with someone. You want to remember even the most mundane moments. You wish you had inhabited them more completely and marked yourself with them more indelibly—not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it. Because you’re not ready for the story to end. But you only discover this when it’s too late.
I reflect on that as I lie awake waiting for the sun.
I pull up to Nana Betsy’s house at 6:54 a.m. and sit in my car until 7:01. A dog barks at me from behind a chain link fence across the street, and there’s the buzzing of insects, but otherwise the neighborhood is Saturday-sleepy and placid. The air is still heavy with the humidity of summer, even though we’re almost done with the first week of September. Dew sparkles on the grass that’s getting a bit long. I make a mental note to return soon to mow.
Nana Betsy answers the door wearing a T-shirt with teddy bears on it, a University of Tennessee baseball hat, grandma jeans, and white sneakers. She looks the sort of tired that tattoos itself on your face. Not a sort of temporary, passing tired that you can sleep off or wash away. But a little of it disappears when she smiles.
“Blade. Come in, come in. So.”
“So.” I return her weary smile and step inside.
“Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t mind getting dirty?”
“Nope.”
“Good, because I thought we’d kick things off with one of Blake’s and my favorite ways to spend a Saturday morning: going bad-fishing. Then we’ll hit up the Waffle House, our favorite place for breakfast.”
“Wait, you mean bass-fishing?”
“Bad-fishing. I’ll explain in the car.”
I help Nana Betsy load a pair of fishing poles and lawn chairs, a cooler, and a tackle box into the trunk of her creaky, peeling, brown Buick. I sink into the pillowy seat. It smells like pine and dusty tissues, and the dash is illuminated with multiple orange lights. The engine makes a squealing noise as we reverse out of the driveway. The radio, tuned to WSM 650 AM, quietly plays Johnny Cash.
“Blake came up with the name, of course,” Nana Betsy says. “I’m nowhere near as quick with the jokes.”
“Nobody is.”
“True. Anyway, bad-fishing is just that. Bad fishing. We weren’t ever any good at it. When Blake first came to live with me, he was eight. He hadn’t ever done any of the things a boy that age ought to have done. Mitzi was always drunk or high. The only men around the house were her boyfriends or worse. So they’d sit Blake in front of the TV for hours and hours on end.”
“That’s how he got into comedy. Watching all that TV. He never talked much about his old life, but he did tell me that.”
“So anyway, one day Blake says to me, ‘Nana, I wanna go fishing like people on TV do.’ Well, my husband Rolly loved fishing. But he’d passed on by then. So I guessed I’d better try to figure it out. I go and buy us a pair of fishing poles and some hooks, and I dig up some worms. We’ll do it like in the cartoons, I reckon. So we go and spend all morning and don’t catch a thing. Not a bite. But Lord almighty, we had fun—cutting up, talking, drinking root beers. We’d been a fair number of times when Blake finally says to me—” Nana Betsy starts shaking with laughter, wiping her eyes. “Sorry, it’s not really that funny. But he says, ‘Nana, we ain’t bass-fishin’, we’re bad-fishin’.’ ”
I’d prepared myself for the experience of treading on sacred ground. But the reality is something else. I suddenly want to confess exactly why I’m not worthy to be doing this. Then Mr. Krantz’s voice echoes in my head and yanks me down to reality. A partial confession only. “Nana Betsy, I’m not sure I’m the person to be doing this. This is so special.”
She turns down the already-quiet radio. “It is special. It’s the most special thing we could be doing at this moment. Which means I decide who’s worthy to be doing it with me. And when I say you are, you are. Got it?” Her tone is kind, but with a don’t-mess-with-me edge.
She glances over at me and I nod.
“What would Blake say if he were here?” she asks. “Would he say, ‘No, Nana, he’s not worthy to be doing this’?”
I shake my head. But I still fear that Nana Betsy’s and Blake’s generosity aren’t enough to absolve me.
“The first time he ever mentioned you was on a bad-fishing trip,” Nana Betsy says.
“Really?”
“I asked him how he was doing at school, if he’d been making friends. He had plenty of Internet fans from his web page, but that’s not the same as real friends. I worried about that because he hadn’t had the best social examples.”
“You wouldn’t have known it.”
“I thought so, but here we’re moving from little-bitty East Tennessee to the big city and he’s thrust into this school with all these smart, talented kids. I knew Blake was smart and talented, but I worried.”
“So what did he tell you?”
Nana Betsy smiles. “He says, ‘Nana, I met this nice guy at school named Carver and he ate lunch with me. We’re gonna be friends!’ ”
“That’s exactly how he said it?” It sounds so childlike.
“Exactly. I remember because it was one of those days I knew we’d done the right thing by uprooting our lives and moving out here. That was a big risk and I was scared.”
And then a flash realization: That risk you took resulted in Blake’s death. If you and Blake had stayed put, he wouldn’t have died. “Do you ever regret coming here?” I ask quietly. I can’t bring myself to ask the rest of the question and connect the dots.
But she seems to have done it anyway. Her eyes glaze with a faraway sheen and well up. “No. Blake died here. But if we hadn’t come, he’d never have lived. He found his people here. God’s hand guides our lives, and I believe he guided us to this place. I don’t know why he ordained for Blake to be taken from us; he works in mysterious ways.”
We sit for a few moments with silence between us like a curtain suspended from a thin thread. Then Nana Betsy turns up the radio. “We’ll talk plenty today. But for now, we need to be singing off-key at the top of our lungs to old country music. Tradition is tradition.”
We pull up to Percy Priest Lake, park, and hike a little ways to their fishing spot. We set up the lawn chairs. Nana Betsy helps me bait my hook, chuckling. “I believe I’ve found the lone person on Earth worse at fishing than Blake and me.”
“Lucky you.”
We cast our lines and settle into our chairs.
Nana Betsy claps me on the knee and points. “Look,” she whispers. An elegant blue heron glides past, its spindly legs ramrod straight behind it.
“Whoa.”
“That’s half the reason we’d come. We’d sit in this beautiful place and ponder God’s creation.”
Nana Betsy looks wistfully across the lake. She starts to say something. She covers her mouth, but she’s shaking with laughter and snorting. “Of course, not even God’s mighty creation was safe from Blake. Once, four or five deer walked right up to the edge of the lake to drink, not fifteen feet from us. So we watch them, and Blake whispers: ‘What do you guess God was thinking, Nana? He makes these nice brown deer that blend in with everything, and then he says, No, not done yet. And he gives them these glorious, brilliant, gleaming-white asses. The most beautiful asses of all of God’s creatures.’ ”
We laugh until we’re winded.
“It’s probably why we never caught anything. Couldn’t shut up. Scared the fish,” Nana Betsy says. And after a moment of reflection
: “I think a lot about how he changed me. Did he change you?”
My mouth starts before my brain even knows it’s ready. “He made me less afraid to be naked.”
Nana Betsy looks slightly horrified.
“Not that way. Less afraid to be vulnerable. Sorry.”
“Oh, because with Blake…”
“Yeah, you never knew.”
Nana Betsy opens the cooler and pulls out a root beer and hands it to me.
I open it and take a sip. “Once I went with Blake to film a video. The one where he walked into Green Hills Mall shirtless.”
Nana Betsy claps her hand over her face. “Oh. I wish you’d talked him out of that. Lord almighty.”
“Oh, believe me, I tried. I was dying just following him with the camera. I was so relieved when a security guard finally kicked us out after he went into Nordstrom.”
“Didn’t he ask the security guard how he was supposed to get a shirt if he wasn’t allowed to go into a place that sells them?”
“Something like that. Anyway, we go out to the car, and I’m like, ‘Dude, Blake, aren’t you embarrassed?’ And he looks at me like I’m the crazy one, and he goes, ‘Have you ever thought less of somebody for making you laugh on purpose’? And I think for a sec and say no. And he goes: ‘Dignity is overrated. People can live without it. I know because I did. But people can’t live without laughter. I’ll gladly trade dignity for laughter, because dignity is cheap and laughter is worth everything.’ ”
Nana Betsy stares out over the lake, shaking her head slightly. She clears her throat a couple of times and wipes her nose. “He always said the first part to me. Never the second part. How much did Blake tell you about his circumstances growing up?”
“Not much. He obviously hated talking about it. I figured it was bad.”
Nana Betsy finishes off her root beer, puts the empty in the cooler, and pulls out another. She looks pained. “Mitzi was our wild child. She was our youngest, and I guess we were too tired by then to be as strict as we ought to have been, so she did whatever she pleased. She got pregnant with Blake when she was sixteen. It could’ve been any of five men, all over thirty. She picked the one with the nicest trailer and most running cars and convinced him that Blake was his.”
“So Blake never knew who his real dad was?”
“No. And all the possibilities were awful.”
“Jeez.”
“So they”—Nana Betsy makes air quotes—“raise Blake. Which meant sitting him in front of the TV for hours a day in the same filthy diaper while they partied and snorted meth. Sometimes they’d let me take him for the day, and I’d bathe him and feed him good food and try to teach him to talk and read and all the things he was behind on.”
“Did you ever call—”
“Child Protection? My heavens, yes. The sheriff? Many times. But we’re talking about a rural county with limited resources. They don’t do a thing.”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“So this goes on until Blake is eight. They leave him for days. He’s not attending school. Mitzi’s boyfriends are slapping him around. And I’ve finally had it. I go get him without asking anyone’s permission. I figure if the sheriff and Child Protection can’t protect Blake from Mitzi, they can’t protect Mitzi from me protecting Blake.”
This spurs a memory. “There’s another way Blake tried to change me,” I say softly. “We were hanging out in my room; I don’t remember what we were doing. Anyway, my mom knocks on the door to ask me a question and I get supermad—I’m embarrassed telling you this because it makes me sound like the worst kid ever.”
“I’m not judging you. You said that Blake taught you not to be afraid of vulnerability.”
“Okay. Well, I get supermad at my mom and she leaves, and Blake goes, ‘Why are you mean to your mom?’ And I go, ‘Whatever, dude, you don’t understand.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t, because if I had your mom, I’d never be mean to her. You have no clue how lucky you are, but I do.’ So yeah. I’m pretty embarrassed to have treated my mom that way in front of him.”
We sit for a while, smacking mosquitos, sipping root beers, and chatting, the sun hot on our backs. A couple of times we think we might have a bite. Of course it turns out to be nothing. Wind shaking our poles or something. We don’t bother reeling them in to see if our hooks are still baited.
Finally, Nana Betsy looks at her watch. “Blade, I’m getting hungry. It’s probably time to say goodbye to bad-fishing.” Her voice cracks. “You made a very good bad-fishing companion, I must say. Second best I’ve ever had.”
“We can come do this anytime.”
She looks at the ground; out over the lake; and back to the ground, blinking fast. “Afraid not. I’m leaving.”
It doesn’t quite make it into my brain. I think for a second she’s talking about us leaving right then. “Wait. What?”
“I’m moving home. I miss my mountains. I was only ever here for Blake’s sake, to put some distance between our old life and our new life. My two sons live in Greeneville, and my older daughter lives in Chattanooga.”
That shuts me right up.
“I have enough years working for the state to get my retirement. I’m putting the house on the market on Monday. I’m not asking for much. Enough to cover the funeral costs and the cost of some little place on the side of a mountain overlooking a holler. And I’ll watch my stories and read my mysteries and have Sunday dinners with my boys and live quietly with my thoughts and memories until the Lord calls me home.”
It had never occurred to me that Blake’s death would have this particular sort of consequence. I thought its impact would be limited to grief, guilt, aching, missing. Not packing up and moving. I wonder what else will fall now from this shaken tree.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m happy to be going home.”
“I mean I’m sorry for making you move.”
“We’ve been through this. You have no need to apologize.”
But I do. I committed something so close to negligent homicide that I’m not even allowed to tell anybody but Dr. Mendez and Mr. Krantz. If I weren’t guilty, why would I need to be careful about telling my side of the story?
“Okay,” I say finally. I start to pick up my pole.
Nana Betsy puts her hand over mine. “No. Leave it.” She pulls a piece of folded-up notebook paper from her front jeans pocket and unfolds it. She smoothes it and sets it on one of the chairs. She uses an egg-sized rock to weight the paper.
I catch a glimpse of the note, which is written in precise, neat, grammar-school handwriting. It reads:
To whoever finds these things:
Please keep them—they’re yours.
They belonged to my grandson and me.
We were never much good at fishing
but we used them to make many wonderful memories.
I hope you’ll do the same.
In loving memory of Blake Jackson Lloyd
I start up the path, expecting Nana Betsy to follow. She doesn’t.
“Blade, do you mind going along without me for a few minutes? I need a moment or two here alone.” Her voice is a scratchy whisper, the wind through long grass. She hands me the car keys.
Before I go, I watch as she lowers herself into the chair beside the one with the note. She rests her elbows on her knees and buries her face in her hands.
I do the same thing when I get to the car.
We’ve each mostly composed ourselves by the time she joins me, about ten minutes later.
“All right,” she says with what seems to be genuine cheeriness (or at least temporary unburdenedness). “I could use some traditional post-bad-fishing waffles and bacon. How about you?”
“Always.”
We drive to the nearby Waffle House. As we park, Nana Betsy laughs. “This must not seem like a very glorious last day for Blake. But this is what he and I loved to do together. Every Saturday morning we could, for the last few years. I’m only guessing
this is what he’d have wanted for his last day, but it’s definitely what I’d have wanted.”
“Since I’m Blake today, I say it’s what he would have wanted.”
“I think if what you’d do for your last day on Earth doesn’t look like a pretty normal day for you, you probably need to reexamine your life.”
“I agree.” I guess a Buick in a Waffle House parking lot is as good a place as any to have your notion of the well-lived life cracked open wider than the Grand Canyon.
“Let’s go eat some waffles.”
A blond waitress with a smoker’s voice greets us. “Good mornin’, Betsy! Been a while. You got a different breakfast companion.”
Nana Betsy’s smile fades almost imperceptibly. “Hello, Linda. Blake couldn’t make it today. This is his best friend, Carver.”
“Hi.” I wave.
“Good to meet you, honey,” Linda says. “Y’all need a menu or you gettin’ your usual?”
Nana Betsy looks to me. “I’m fine with whatever the usual is,” I say.
“Usual it is,” Nana Betsy says.
“Comin’ right up,” Linda says. “You tell your grandson we missed him today.”
Nana forces a smile. “I bet he knows.”
We sit and Linda hustles off after pouring us cups of coffee. Nana Betsy leans over with a whisper. “I couldn’t tell her. She’s so sweet, and there wouldn’t be any point to making her sad.”
“Blake would have found this funny.”
Nana Betsy’s eyes twinkle. “I imagine he’s looking down from heaven right this moment and laughing about the little trick we’ve played on Linda.”
I smile and play with my fork.
“You believe in heaven?” Nana Betsy asks.
The easy answer is I used to, as casually as I believed anything relating to the Divine. It was an untested, unexamined belief, and so it dwelled comfortably in me. But now? If you came to me and said, “Listen, Blake’s going to die, but that’s okay because you believe in heaven, right?” my answer would have been no.
“Yeah. Mostly,” I say. “But I haven’t spent much of my life considering it like I am now.”