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“Don’t worry, Grandma.”

Colleen tucks her legs up demurely before she asks, “Mrs. Bancroft? What’s it like to be rich?”

Grandma either thinks the question over or pretends to. “Let’s just say I would like to be remembered as someone who had the opportunity to help those less fortunate.”

“So if I had a big, swollen belly and flies crawling all over my face, would you give me money?”

“An organization I am part of certainly might.”

“But if you’re just walking along the street, and there I am in person, with my belly and my flies, would you, like, slip me a twenty?”

Grandma shakes her head slowly, then pauses at the door before she exits. “I’d be afraid you’d just spend it on narcotics.”

Colleen grins. “‘Narcotics.’ You’re really old-school.”

After that she just uses a thumbnail to dig at a callus on one heel. When we hear the front door close, she says, “I’m going to sleep some more, Ben, okay? I’ve never been anywhere this quiet in my life.”

She comes over, kisses me innocently.
Burgled but not violated.
I feel so tender toward her. Protective. Maybe I
am
like my dad, who tried to rescue my mom. So what? If I could save Colleen from one more crappy experience, I totally would.

She honest to God saved my life. She gave me — and this is no bullshit — something to live for. I probably wasn’t going to kill myself or anything like that, but I was for sure headed for Hermitville. Odd-Duck Town. Weirdo City. The gimp in that nice house who gets ten Netflix deliveries a day and only comes out at night.

She stepped into my life that time at the Rialto, and I started to look forward to waking up in the morning.

When six o’clock rolls around and it’s time to eat, I lead Colleen into the kitchen. I tell her to sit down and I’ll do everything.

The casserole Grandma left just needs a few minutes of nuking. In the fridge is a big salad in a shiny, stainless steel bowl. I get a couple of plates and some silverware and hand all of it to Colleen, who deals the plates out but puts the knife and fork and spoon any old way.

“Ben,” she says. “I was just thinking: I really like it here.”

I turn around and lean on the counter. She’s barefoot, and her toes are pink and clean. Jeans and a T-shirt (with no bra). Clothes that I washed for her.

“So,” she adds, “maybe just a modest wedding in Big Sur with a few hundred of our closest friends — A.J., the twins, Rane, and Conrad, for sure. Then, after the honeymoon, we can live right here with Grandma.”

“She’ll be thrilled.” Then I limp over and kiss her hair, which smells like my grandmother’s shampoo. When I turn around, she kicks me in the butt. She’s barefoot, and it isn’t a hard kick, but it’s a little too hard for just kidding around. That is so Colleen: she likes me and she kicks me. She’s kidding and she’s serious. One day she’s clean and sober, and the next, who knows?

I test the casserole and decide it’s not quite hot enough. I pour some Perrier, hold up the bottle, and watch her shake her head.

She looks around the kitchen before she asks, “Did you talk to the refrigerator when you were little?”

I just look at her. “No.”

“That’s when I knew I was in trouble. When the refrigerator stopped talking to me.”

“What’d it say?”

“Just stuff. Not even about being cold or anything. Mostly,
You’re a good girl,
or,
The sun likes you a lot.
Then I’d put my face against it. You didn’t do that?”

“No.”

“Well, I did, and when I stopped, it hit me like a ton of bricks that I wasn’t a good girl and the sun didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. I was just a little kid with dirty feet, living in a stupid apartment with her stupid mother.”

“Mine was just brick by brick, not all at once.”

She glances up at me. “Your what was just brick by brick?”

“What you just said. When all of a sudden you know what things are really like. So, when I’m really little I’m in the hospital and back and forth to doctors, and I know that’s not normal. But when I’m at home, I still play with other kids, except they can get up and run around and I can’t. As long as we’re doing board games, I’m fine; then they get skateboards and scooters, and I’m out of it again, right? Brick by brick, see?”

“So you built a little house nobody could blow down, no matter how hard they huffed and puffed.”

I nod. “I guess.”

“Did you and your folks live here?”

I take a sip of water before I answer. I don’t like to think about staring out the window at the other kids, on their skateboards and bikes. “We had a house on Diamond Avenue. I didn’t come here until later.”

“You mean
we
?”

“I mean
I.
Mom left me on the porch. It was my grandma’s porch, but she still left me.”

She sits up straighter. “Was the Diamond house nice?”

“It was just a house.”

She polishes a clean fork on her T-shirt, then says, “So you moved up, and now you’re quite the catch for the right girl: cute, rich, hot to trot.”

“Short, crippled, clumsy. You’re the only girl who ever looked twice at me.”

The microwave pings. I make even lines in the casserole, the way Grandma taught me. Colleen passes the plates. Each one gets a perfect square of quick-and-easy cheesy pasta-and-bean casserole. Then some salad, which has a few candied walnuts and those cherry-size tomatoes. Grandma knows I like candied walnuts.

Colleen starts to eat, but I stay on my feet and pour us big glasses of Alta Dena Dairy’s finest.

She puts away most of her dinner in about a minute, then drinks all the milk. I want to ask her when was the last time she ate, but I don’t want to sound like her mother. Well, not
her
mother, but a mother.

When she puts the glass down, she has that inevitable white mustache. I know how that would look on film, but I’ve thought about what Marcie said, and I’m pretty sure she’s right. Enough people have used Colleen. She doesn’t need one more.

“So, was your mother certifiable?” she asks.

“I don’t think she was crazy. Grandma says just fragile.”

She takes a last bite — a big one — of casserole, then asks, “Where is she now, anyway?”

I shake my head. “Don’t know and don’t care. She drove over here one morning about twelve years ago, walked me up to the door, rang the bell, and ran.”

She nods. “Wow. Kids do that with a flaming sack of dog shit. Where was your dad?”

“At work. And she’s treating me like a flaming sack of dog shit. Why should I want to find her?”

“Lots of reasons: you could ask her why she did what she did. You could see if she’s a better person now. You could hit her with a two-by-four.”

I reach for a knife I don’t need. “Let’s just eat dinner and watch a movie, okay?”

“Whatever.” She picks at the last of her casserole. “Did I ever tell you about my adventures with Mom? I’m a toddler. Three years old. Couple of times a week, we go out about six thirty, Mom and me. Get in the car, cruise around till we find a nice neighborhood like this. Park and get out. She’d walk and I’d toddle because . . .” She looks at me expectantly.

“You’re a toddler?”

“Exactly. I’m a toddler. Cute as a bug. Walk and toddle, walk and toddle. Finally it starts to get dark, and we’re pretty much alone, so she leads me into the bushes beside some awesome house and lifts me up so I can see the people eating dinner or watching TV. Eating off real plates and chatting about fucking
Masterpiece Theatre.
She’d say, ‘This is us pretty soon, sweetheart.’ Then we’d go eat at Wendy’s, where she’d lean over and let the assistant manager look down her dress so he’d super-size us for free. Nice, huh?”

There’s sorbet for dessert. Colleen watches me use this special scoop that somehow glides through the hardest ice cream.

She says, “Amazing. Mom and I eat it right out of the carton.”

I start to rinse the plates and glasses and put them in the dishwasher. Grandma has a pricey little AM/FM radio on the counter. It (the radio, not the counter) was designed by Jonas Damon. Whoever that is. But it means something to my grandmother. Tonight when I switch it on, Mexican music pours out. The housecleaners probably found that station. Unless my grandma has a secret life.

“Well, aren’t you romantic,” Colleen says. “All we need is a candle and an extra-large condom.”

She can still make me blush. I limp back toward the table. “Should I turn it off?”

“What you should do,” she says, “is kiss me.”

I lean toward her, but in a way I have to lean through the music, because it’s that melancholy. She takes hold of my hair and pulls, but it’s not one of her famous collision kisses for a change. It’s just a nice kiss.

“I know this song,” she says, letting me go like a fisherman doing catch-and-release. “Paloma is a dove and some guy’s soul, too. He’s crying and not eating, and even the sky is shaking because he’s suffering so much for some girl.” She finishes my milk in one gulp. “Or some bullshit like that.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I ran with some tough chicks. But, you know, mostly on the surface, with the tats and the scars and the stretch marks. The guys are in the other room, doing shots and measuring their dicks, and we’re in the kitchen, seeing who’s the superskank. But pretty soon we get tired of that, and they start talking about a nice house where they could let their kids play outside and not get clipped by some moron with a piece. And this song comes on, and they start whispering about some
chico
in the sixth grade who wrote poetry.”

Her voice has dropped, there’s that light on her face (those killer cheekbones), and she’s fiddling with the napkin.

I ask, “Did you ever cry over a guy?”

She acts like I’d asked her to recite “The Raven” in Urdu. “Fuck, no. Did you ever cry over a girl?”

“Get serious. I never had a girlfriend to cry over.”

“And now you’ve got two.”

I reach for her silverware. “If you mean A.J., first of all, you said she was just curious about me, and you’re right. Second, no way would you let me call you my girlfriend.”

She looks toward the ceiling and pretends to be amazed. “From Mary Fivefingers — and that doesn’t really count — to two live girls. It’s like you won the lottery, Ben. Or at least got a second car. Except I’m the beater all corroded by the elements, and A.J.’s a Lexus.”

“You’re not a corroded beater.”

She tucks her head. “Well, I feel like one sometimes.”

She lets me smooth her hair and kiss her on dumb places like her shoulders and her nose before we settle in the den, where the big TV is. Barely bigger, actually, than the other ones in the house. My grandma is kind of a semi-Buddhist: she’s not attached to large things. So I don’t switch on some 102-inch, throbbing plasma, just a supercrisp 32-inch wide-screen LCD.

“What are we watching, baby?”

Baby.
It doesn’t mean anything. She probably called all her boyfriends
baby.
But I still love it.

I tell her, “It’s a surprise.”

I’ve seen
The Usual Suspects
a dozen times. It’s a terrific movie, but especially the opening: the dark water, the explosions, the shadowy figure, the guns.

After that, I watch Colleen watch. She’s totally absorbed, and that’s the expression I love: her mouth open a little while she tries to figure out what everybody else is trying to figure out — who is Keyser Söze?

We work our way through the lineup (that’s where the title comes from, which is ironic, because no way are those five guys the usual suspects), the slick robbery, the bungled one, all the way back to the burning ship. Then Verbal Klint, played by the amazing Kevin Spacey, exits the police station dragging one foot and favoring one arm, like he has in every frame until now. But a block away, suddenly he stands straighter and strides out. His left hand unclenches and he lights a cigarette with a gold lighter before he’s whisked away in a black Jaguar. The end. Roll credits. Bring up the lights.

Colleen bounces on the couch, she’s so jazzed. “Holy shit, Ben. No wonder you love this movie. You are Verbal Klint!”

“Except I’m not pretending to be crippled.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have C.P. I’m just saying, for years you fooled everybody into thinking you’re this total cipher. But you and I go to clubs, you made a movie and showed up at that gallery, and half the school knows who you are now.” She pats the cushion right beside her. “Get your disabled ass over here so I can drive you crazy with desire.”

But all we do is make out. A little. And that winds down fairly fast. I can tell Colleen’s not really into it. Or into me, maybe.

I ask her, “Everything okay?”

She stretches. Her long arms go straight up, and under the one right next to me is a couple of days’ worth of stubble. “I’m probably just tired,” she says. “I’m not used to all this.”

“What’s ‘all this’?”

“You know — a bathroom all my own, clean sheets, dinner and a movie. It kind of wears me out.” She gets to her feet so fast that, even though I’m sitting down, I still lose my balance and fall over on the couch. She says, “I’ll see you in the morning, kid.”

Three seconds later I’m all by myself, so it’s okay for me to roll off the couch, onto the floor, get on my knees, and eventually pull myself up. Not a pretty sight.

I’m barely in my bedroom before the phone rings, and it’s A.J.

“Is this too late? Were you asleep?”

“No, it’s okay. What’s up?”

“Did you get my message about the racetrack? Well, my dad set it up, but it’s for tomorrow morning. Are you okay with that?”

“Sure.”

“Six a.m. tomorrow morning.”

“Yikes.”

“So . . . ?”

“What if Colleen came with us? I don’t think she’ll want to, but what if she did?”

There’s a very long three-second silence before A.J. asks, “Why would she want to?”

“She’s staying here. With Grandma and me. For just a couple of days.”

“And this is just you being a good friend?”

“Something like that. Nobody ever crashed at your house?”

“Yeah, but we made s’mores and watched DVDs.”

“She doesn’t have anyplace else to go.”