Page 62 of Goodbye Days

“Aw man, you’ve never heard of it. Andrew Johnson Middle School. It’s in Greeneville.”

“South Carolina?”

“East Tennessee. Way closer to North Carolina than here.”

“How’d you end up here?”

“I live with my grandma, and my grandpa died a while ago, so she needed a change and she wanted me to go to a good school. So we moved here.”

“Cool. You like Nashville?”

“Yeah. I wish I knew more people.”

We drift out to the hall. “You wanna hang out for lunch?” I ask.

He brightens. “Sure, dude. Let’s go.”

We go and eat lunch. He shows me his YouTube page. I tell him about my stories. We laugh.

We laugh a lot, actually.

There was probably some period when we weren’t best friends and inseparable. Days. Maybe weeks, even. But in my memory, from that day on we were as good friends as we’d ever be. It’s funny how memory cuts out the boring parts. And that makes it a good story editor. Sometimes, though, you want to remember every minute you spent with someone. You want to remember even the most mundane moments. You wish you had inhabited them more completely and marked yourself with them more indelibly—not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it. Because you’re not ready for the story to end. But you only discover this when it’s too late.

I reflect on that as I lie awake waiting for the sun.

I pull up to Nana Betsy’s house at 6:54 a.m. and sit in my car until 7:01. A dog barks at me from behind a chain link fence across the street, and there’s the buzzing of insects, but otherwise the neighborhood is Saturday-sleepy and placid. The air is still heavy with the humidity of summer, even though we’re almost done with the first week of September. Dew sparkles on the grass that’s getting a bit long. I make a mental note to return soon to mow.

Nana Betsy answers the door wearing a T-shirt with teddy bears on it, a University of Tennessee baseball hat, grandma jeans, and white sneakers. She looks the sort of tired that tattoos itself on your face. Not a sort of temporary, passing tired that you can sleep off or wash away. But a little of it disappears when she smiles.

“Blade. Come in, come in. So.”

“So.” I return her weary smile and step inside.

“Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t mind getting dirty?”

“Nope.”

“Good, because I thought we’d kick things off with one of Blake’s and my favorite ways to spend a Saturday morning: going bad-fishing. Then we’ll hit up the Waffle House, our favorite place for breakfast.”

“Wait, you mean bass-fishing?”

“Bad-fishing. I’ll explain in the car.”

I help Nana Betsy load a pair of fishing poles and lawn chairs, a cooler, and a tackle box into the trunk of her creaky, peeling, brown Buick. I sink into the pillowy seat. It smells like pine and dusty tissues, and the dash is illuminated with multiple orange lights. The engine makes a squealing noise as we reverse out of the driveway. The radio, tuned to WSM 650 AM, quietly plays Johnny Cash.

“Blake came up with the name, of course,” Nana Betsy says. “I’m nowhere near as quick with the jokes.”

“Nobody is.”

“True. Anyway, bad-fishing is just that. Bad fishing. We weren’t ever any good at it. When Blake first came to live with me, he was eight. He hadn’t ever done any of the things a boy that age ought to have done. Mitzi was always drunk or high. The only men around the house were her boyfriends or worse. So they’d sit Blake in front of the TV for hours and hours on end.”

“That’s how he got into comedy. Watching all that TV. He never talked much about his old life, but he did tell me that.”

“So anyway, one day Blake says to me, ‘Nana, I wanna go fishing like people on TV do.’ Well, my husband Rolly loved fishing. But he’d passed on by then. So I guessed I’d better try to figure it out. I go and buy us a pair of fishing poles and some hooks, and I dig up some worms. We’ll do it like in the cartoons, I reckon. So we go and spend all morning and don’t catch a thing. Not a bite. But Lord almighty, we had fun—cutting up, talking, drinking root beers. We’d been a fair number of times when Blake finally says to me—” Nana Betsy starts shaking with laughter, wiping her eyes. “Sorry, it’s not really that funny. But he says, ‘Nana, we ain’t bass-fishin’, we’re bad-fishin’.’ ”