“Why so hurried?” Grandma asks when she opens the door of her house in the San Fernando Valley, her short-sleeved, floral housedress loose around her stooping frame, the fan whirring noisily in the living room. “Why so early? You always early. Never can wait.”

I take Grandma’s hand in mine so that she can lean on me as she hobbles to the shabby green couch.

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*This short story was published in Hyphen Magazine, Issue 10: Music, Fall 2006.

Raquel’s crazy Uncle Pete is crowing, “Keraw, keraw, keroo!” and tapping on the window of her dorm room with the bouquet of twigs that he had brought from the Valley. He had been wrestling with Raquel’s grandma’s dog when he rolled over some leaves in the dirt. They had crunched underneath his back, crackled like the balled-up newspapers he sometimes threw into the wire rim above the garage door of grandma’s house. He would leave the garage door open so that when he missed, the paper balls would shoot straight into his room, where they collected with the shreds of tire rubber, chewed up lollipop sticks, and bent metal scraps that he found in the streets. The prettier things he gave to Raquel, like the twigs he discovered that morning after following the trail of leaves on his hands and knees.

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