There were several other snapshots, mostly in color, of infants and smaller children that Victor didn’t recognize; these were mostly displayed, in their gift-shop plastic frames, on a plastic, faux driftwood shelf that hung on the wall to the left of the television. He was about to turn away from these when he realized that one of them was surely the picture of the baby his father’s new wife had given birth to just weeks before Victor left the hospital, a baby girl, with an odd name that Victor had forgotten, but which he remembered disliking as soon as he heard it, an unusual name, but fashionable these days, a name that sounded more like a man’s last name than a little girls name, he didn’t want to remember it, but it came to him anyway; Madison. Victor wondered if he would ever meet her. He had never met his father’s new wife, whom he imagined to be, as the wedding pictures that were sent to him in the hospital indicated, a blonde, far younger than his father.
He stepped away from these shelves and looked at the wall above the couch. There was a painting there, or at least a print, of a familiar image, two small children, a boy and a girl, crossing a bridge, oblivious to the presence of a diaphanous, smiling angel hovering above them. Next to this there was an oval framed picture, which upon close inspection proved to be a very old photograph, of a little girl in a checked dress and what looked like saddle shoes, standing between a very wizened old woman in a shapeless flower-print dress and a glowering old man with a handlebar mustache and a watch chain looped across the vest of his black suit. Victor found he could not take his eyes off the image of the old man, he, more so than the little girl or the old woman, seemed to suggest another time, a way of life lost to the world. The old man looked out of the picture as if defending the very spirit of the past that his image represented, while the old woman and the little girl looked out with merry smiles. His image radiated disapproval as manifestly as the old woman’s image radiated kindness and the little girl’s reflected innocence. Victor wasn’t sure how long he stood staring at that picture when the sound of footsteps behind him startled him. He turned to see his grandmother, in a ragged nightgown and strips of toilet paper clipped to her hairline, baring her bridgework at him.
“Morning, honey,” she said. “Did you sleep good?”
Victor nodded.
“You’re up mighty early. You hungry? I’ll have some breakfast in a little bit. Do you like grits?”
He nodded. His mother, being from the north, never made grits, but they often had them for breakfast in the hospital, where he developed a taste for them. “Thank you,” he remembered to say.
“It’ll be a little while,” his grandmother scratched a place on her nightgown just below her small, low slung breasts. “Just rest yourself some more, you worked hard last night. What have you been doing, looking around?”
“Yeah.”
His grandmother smiled and pointed at the oval picture. “You know who that little girl is?”
Victor shook his head. “You?” he said.
Her smile drew itself in and turned upside down in the peculiar way it had. “Yes sir. Believe it or not, I was young once. That’s me with my grandma and granddaddy. They had a big house on Harker’s Island, and I used to stay there every summer. Granddaddy fished and was a part time Methodist preacher, and had nine children with my grandma and four with the one after her. He fathered a child at the age of seventy-one, can you beat that? That was my aunt Millicent, born when I was already thirteen. I’ll have to take you to meet Millicent, she lives down east.”
Victor looked at the old man in the picture with renewed curiosity. Ancient as time, yet he had not yet, when this image was captured, planted his last seed. “What was his name?” Victor asked.
“Carlos,” his grandmother said, musingly, “Carlos Blattery. I always wondered, and never did ask him, or anybody, how come it was he had a Spanish name. The Blattery’s as far as I know, come here from England. Maybe his mama just liked the sound of it. But that was his name, anyway. Not Charles, but Carlos. As mean as a snake, too, I never saw him smile for anything. But he provided for his family, that’s for sure.” With this she walked into the kitchen, but after a moment she came back. “You see how chipped the varnish is on that old frame? I’d take it down and put something else up there, but Shelby loves it so, I figure it don’t hurt to leave it up there….”
“It’s nice,” said Victor. “It’s probably worth some money.”
His grandmother snorts. “Well… I don’t know about that,” a whistle that rapidly grew into an insistent shriek issued from the kitchen, where his grandmother had put on a teapot to boil. She went back in there to attend to it, and from the other room called out, “It’s something to look at, anyway. Every picture tells a story, I reckon.”
When breakfast was ready Victor’s grandmother left the kitchen and rapped on Shelby’s bedroom door and screeched for her to wake up, but she left her son alone. “He can’t eat breakfast, and he can have his milkshakes anytime he wants them,” she explained.
Shelby shuffled into the kitchen puffy eyed and yawning. She wore an enormous t-shirt that reached to her shins with a picture of a cartoon Tasmanian devil on the front of it. “Morning,” she said to Victor, sounding as if she was speaking through a mouthful of glue. “Dang! I forgot you were here until just now!”
Victor was not used to eating breakfast, and left half the bowl of grits, though he finished the eggs and toast. Morning seemed to be a fairly relaxed time of day in the house, for a few minutes after the three of them were all finished eating, they lingered at the table, each with a refilled cup of coffee and a cigarette. Nobody said anything, but the silence was not awkward, and Victor unselfconsciously watched the play of cigarette smoke in the very bright morning sunlight that streamed in through the windows across from his seat at the table.
“I thought I’d show Victor around today, take him to the beach,” said Shelby after awhile. “You put him to work before he even had a chance to get any culture.”
“Just be back by quarter of three,” said their grandmother.
“We’ll need some money to take,” says Shelby.
“What for? The beach don’t cost anything!”
“We’ll need lunch, won’t we?”
“Then you better fix some. I’m not made of money.”
“I can’t drive yet,” Shelby explained as she zipped the lid of the polyester cooler that held their food. “So we’ll have to walk. You don’t drive yet, either, do you?”
“No,” Victor said, and he wondered just how much his cousin knew about his life. He assumed she must know, that his grandmother must have mentioned to her, over the years, that he had problems. And yet, he had to admit, she did not act as if she knew. Neither one of them did. It was as if, like Uncle Buzz’s obviously uncontrollable alcoholism, the grandmother’s guileless bigotry, and Shelby’s mysterious, evil mother, Victor’s hospitalization was just one of those things that happens in families.
“I took the road test in the spring, but I failed it,” Shelby said. “I was supposed to practice some more with daddy, and take the test again on my birthday, but then daddy got worse. So it’s on hold. My best friend has her own car, so