Yuma, Arizona.

After Preston died, they sat round on the floor on the carpet with grainy Country Time lemonade. It was late at night and the warm desert breezes would gently rap on the door and let themselves in. The stories were too good for them to eavesdrop.

They would laugh about Grandpa, the one I only knew in a wheelchair; apparently he was love. He never was too bright, but he was solid love. They all loved him, and sat in a cross-legged dilapidated circle passing the piece pipe of tall tales.
“Remember all those times he fell off the roof?” Aunt Willy would say. Guffaws erupted into crying. And I, sitting on the sofa, my soft little eyes tracing the faces of my predecessors, announced the coming of my bedtime with a large yawn. What were they talking about, I wondered? White curls and footie pajamas punctuate the event in my memory. Punctuated with photographs passed over my tiny legs to my mother on the right, my father on the left.
Once late at night, Grandpa got up from his bed after hearing scuffles from underneath their house in Baker, Oregon.
Grabbing a flashlight and shovel, he made his way to the crawlspace and discovered a possum. No sense of squeamishness in his bones, and every ounce dedicated to the task in front of him. Grandpa Preston killed it with a solid hit by the shovel.
And—because it was crucial to my Aunt’s story—Grandpa didn’t leave the possum outside, but brought it in to show my Grandma, holding it inches from her peacefully sleeping face.
“Flo! Look what I found!”
But now he was gone.
Grandma would spray the air ferns held in kitsch glass bowls, telling me how life needed less water to grow in the desert. Spritzing away, she let the water melt onto the pumice stones that cupped the tiny droplets. I gazed in wonder. Life in the desert was arid like Grampa Preston’s cracked lips that smacked with a pink tongue after a dinner of dry meatloaf and crumbling potato.
When the sun danced onto the wood paneling of the trailer bedroom, I would wake up and look out at the front veranda. Mermaid the dog slept on the orange couch, all fuzzing and pilling up from the love and conversation over the years. The neighbors across the way had a lemon tree and grandma took my hand as we picked lemons from a ladder. Incredible how lemons could grow in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a trailer park in Yuma, Arizona. Did these old people water the tree with a spray bottle like my grandma watered her air ferns?
This is why old people move to Arizona, I thought, so they dry up instead of turn into puddles when the rain falls down. We waved goodbye to the nice couple, he with oversized sunglasses and she with pink trouser pants, holding our bag of lemons.
This is when my grandma began to forget to pay the bills.