The Door Girl, Part 32

I am roughly 10. I am sound asleep in my room. All of a sudden she comes tearing in and flips the lights on.

“I lost my fucking drugs,” she screams. Before I know it, the opening part of the headboard is sliding across my forehead like a sailboat over placid water.

She doesn’t find her drugs. I am bleeding. She leaves the room.

        The next morning, she wakes me for school and seeing the gash gasps, “Shit. You’re not going to school looking like that today.” And so I stay home until my head heals and we can go back to playing pretend like we always do without ruining our good family name.

My grandma was my refuge during those years before foster care. Gigi, we called her. Her last name was Graham, so it only made sense. She did not, however, find the humor in it when we started calling her “Grandma G-String,” because she was too high-class for bullshit like that.

Gigi was diagnosed with Parkinson’s shortly after she retired for her job at the county clerk’s office. Everything shook, including her lips. We put food on a spoon and scraped it below her top teeth to just get something in her mouth to eat.

One day we were sitting there and I sneezed.

“Excuse me!” I laughed.

“I’ll never understand why people try to hold their sneezes in. It’s one of the greatest joys in life,” she quipped.