Lemonade Daniel Riddle Rodriguez (bio) Your grandmother is on her deathbed now. She made it a long time ago. Which is to say it was made for her. Which really means she doesn’t want it but she’s going to lie down anyway. You prop her pillows for her, lace her lemonade with Demerol because she is dying and dying hurts you. She says so herself. She says: Dying hurts, You! Then she downs her lemon and painkiller cocktail. Two gulps and her eyes go gaga inside the tiny thing that you know is her head. It looks like an onion now. A piece of old fruit. A fermenting thing. She says it tastes funny sometimes. The lemonade. She makes a face like she is turning a thumbscrew but the thumbscrew is her face. Like this . . . The living room is a rest haven for white noise. The air dense, tart with the copper-coin smell of your grandmother and tv dinners. Sitting in her dusty wingback, she stabs blindly at chicken fried steak with an oyster fork, watches tv. This time it isn’t mash. Tonight is courtroom drama, a police procedural: cigarette smoke in the interrogation room, good cop bad cop. You sit next to your grandmother, finger the lace doilies, and work the remote. She coughs pieces of herself onto the floor while you explain the nuances: He’s the one who did it, Ma. Nights like these you dissolve pieces of black tar in a Visine bottle, sniff deeply to keep from nose-diving into carpet fibers. The detective on the show plays the hambone card, the perp wilting under a combination of palm strikes and police jargon: Where you’d hide the body, pervo? [End Page 133] But mostly it was mash. Hunnicutt and Hawkeye. Witty repartee. She likes to hold your hand while you watch. You don’t really like that. Her hands are scary, a pair of liver-spotted carcasses barely held by the skin that keeps them. The way twice-boiled chicken slides groaning off the bone, only to plummet back into the soup, releasing itself from itself. Your grandmother is like that—a thing awaiting release. Your grandmother is like a chicken. Does it hurt? you say to her. Being a chicken? Only when I’m thirsty, she says, pointing to the cup. You need to renew her prescription soon. No traffic on the way to the pharmacy today. Bockman Road is all pedestrians: kids playing ball, playing house, hooky. A sheriff in a blue Charger follows you for a while, riding your tail, before taking the filtering lane toward Hayward and out of the Village. San Lorenzo’s changing the way unincorporated towns are apt to: one failed mom-and-pop at a time. You reconcile, assign events monumental to the shifting landscape. There’s the strip mall that shoulders the clock tower. There’s the corner where bums converge, tweekers posing as vets and vice versa, to ply their trade: dumpster dive for bottles, for cans, a bit of copper if the cards are right. You know their trade well, were part of the same union once, paid dues. Outside the pharmacy, one of them—a man with a pushcart and a tiny dog, terrier maybe—offers you a paper cup and the chance to fill it. Just fifty cents, man, he says, shaking the cup. For the bus, man, the bus. Judging from the shallow pool of coins in the cup, the bum’ll still be swimming in garbage long after the buses stop running. Maybe even a jaunt through the city dump for loose metal to fill the cart, cap off the night. That shit has some squeaky wheels, you say. He smiles. But I push this muthafucka, right? Point A, Point B. He shakes the Dixie again. You toss him a grubby single. ‘‘Where you going to park it?’’ The bum puts a finger over his lips like wouldn’t you like to know. God bless you, boss, he says, pantomiming a priest, crossing the air between you. He pushes the cart into the street. Point B is waiting, he says, to himself but maybe not...