Nanowrimo - Part 3

He opened the door as quietly as he could, even though the door always scraped against the jamb as it opened. To minimize the sound, he pulled hard on the doorknob, up and to the right as he opened it, and still there was a slight scratching sound and a tiny pop when the door swung free of its frame. He stuck his head through the opening, because the light over the doorway would spill into the room, and wake his grandmother if she were sleeping on the couch. There was a green hoodie with a white skull on the back hanging on a hook by the door, so he gently took it down and put it on outside, to cover his bloody arm.

He stepped through the doorway, closing the door carefully and quietly, pressing it in slowly enough to avoid the scraping. Once inside, Mike craned his neck around towards the kitchen and eating area to the left, in case his grandmother might be in there, getting a midnight snack. After peering into the darkness and seeing no one, he crept silently through the small living room, pressed close to the wall. The feel of the cold wall to his back, amid the hot night air, reminded him of one or two houses that he had been in, creeping around this same way. He made his way noiselessly towards the doorless arch the led to the two bedrooms in this apartment and smile at his own stealthiness.

Just then, a light flashed on from behind him, casting his startled, cringing shadow across the floor in front of him. He turned slowly, and in the dim light, he saw his grandmother, her slight frame hunched over a steaming mug resting on a magazine on the coffee table.

"Another late night, huh, Mike." Her raspy voice filled the dim, silent room.

Mike turned slowly with what he hoped was a nonchalant look on his face and a normal-looking arm and pant leg. "Not really. What time is it?" he said.

Beverly Barnes slowly sipped her to tea from the black ceramic mug. She set the mug right back into the ring it had left in the magazine. "Late. After midnight. Almost one. Only people up this hour is the devil and his own."

Mike tried to give that smile that had gotten him out of so many beatings as a child, but his grandmother just stared through it and blew over he mug of tea.

"Well, I certainly ain't the devil," Mike said.

Grandma Bev slowly picked up the mug and sipped the tea again, letting it heat her tired throat before setting it back down again. "No." She said, "No, you're not."

She looked into Mike's eyes, and Mike looked back as long as he dared, until he felt he couldn't hold her gaze any longer, without giving something away. His eyes found some spot on the floor, some tear or bump in the carpet to scrutinize. "Well," he said, stretching and yawning with real fatigue, "I guess I'm going ..."

"Sit down."

Mike looked at his grandmother, to see if she was serious, but also partly to see if it was really her. There were times when, despite her frail body and thin, rough voice, she became so powerful and so intimidating, not the grandmother who baked for him and sneaked him candy when his mother was alive, but the grandmother who forced him to labor through math problems and commanded him to eat vegetables after she was dead. Ever since the night his mother died, sometimes he could swear that there was a force in this old woman, something separate from her but looking through her eyes and living through her body, a force that he didn't understand, but always recognized, and feared. This was one of those times.

Mike sat down in the armchair across from his grandmother.

"Now then," she began, stirring her tea with her spoon, making clinking noises like the sound of chains rattling while she talked. "I won't ask you where you've been, because I don't want to hear you lie. So let me just ask you something else." She drew one long sip of the hot tea, letting it swish in her mouth before swallowing it. "What do you think is out there for you? You think someone's waiting for you to come along and give you a million bucks? And you don't have to give up anything for it if they do?"

Mike shifted his weight in the armchair, the paper-wrapped package pressed up against he side of his lower leg, making it sweat right through the brown paper so that he could feel he slickness of the plastic underneath. The pain in his arm surged again, and he resisted the urge to touch it. "I'm not doing anything so bad, Mama. Just doing the only thing I can. Just trying to make money, for us." He felt exposed. The one lamp giving any light seemed aimed directly at him. He sat bathed in soft light while his grandmother peered at him from behind darkness. He wanted to tend to is arm, but didn't dare move it now.

Grandma Bev blew over the tea again. The blackness of the mug and the blackness of the liquid inside and the blackness of her hands all blended together in the darkened room. She looked like a prophet or a judge getting ready to make a declaration. As she bent over the mug to blow into it, her own eyes reflected back at her in the rippling tea.

"I wonder if that man who killed your mother said those kinds of things too. I wonder if he was just doing what he could, too." Grandma Bev said, taking another sip of tea, but staring right into Mike's eyes as she did.

Mike's brow screwed up to about half its size, and his cheeks flushed hot and then cold. He looked again at that bubble in the old, worn, brown carpet, and he wondered how much force it would take to smash it flat again.

Beverly placed the mug back perfectly into the growing black ring on the magazine again, then sat back and closed her eyes. "Well," she said, "no use wondering about him. He's dead now anyway."

Mike sat silently and let the words sink in to his soul. He had only been five, and there was so much about that night that he couldn't remember, didn't want to remember, but then so much that stuck with him. It woke him up from his sleep and kept him from coming home at night. When he had been going to school, it would stand beside him, waiting for the perfect moment to tell him that he was very different from the other kids. Even at five, it hadn't been the first time he had seen a gun, certainly not the first time he had heard one fired, but it was the first time he had seen someone shoot at another human being. It was almost instantaneous, the report of the gun and his mother's body falling to the floor. Her beautiful brown face with its wide eyes and soft skin, so smooth to a little boy's touch that he would climb out of bed at night to sleep near her and touch her cheek, that face ran with blood and flesh. And then another shot.

"I've done some very difficult things for you, Michael, and you know it."

Mike looked up at her, into her strong, deep, brown eyes, and nodded his head before looking down again.

"I've made choices and sacrifices that have dug trenches in my soul. And that was my choice." She downed the last of her tea without even blowing on it; it had lost so much of its heat by now. "My choice. But just like these men you run around with, these men you do work for ..." Mike shifted in his chair and opened his mouth to speak, but his grandmother just looked to the side and waved her hand in his direction. "Just like these men, I expect full value for my investment. I want what's coming to me. And I figure that my investment earns me the rights to your soul. I own it. And I'm going to see it saved even if it kills me."