The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Three.

I got the hide-a-bed. Really, I don't know why I was worried. We were the only two staying in the house, and even in my bitterness I didn't believe my mother would force me to sleep on the floor.

After the house was dark, I found my trusty spiral notebook, the first item I had packed. I expected to need nightly catharsis from the pain of cruel, untimely separation from my first-ever boyfriend. I placed my pen on the first empty page and waited.

I tapped aimlessly, trying to conjure something poetic, but reality pressed in: he was a boy who'd helped me carry a lemon cake to my car after it had failed to attracted many customers at a potluck dinner. On the way to the car he'd had about 10 fistfuls of cake, and the next day he asked my best friend (who he'd previously dated) if I'd go out with him. We'd been mini-golfing. We'd agreed to keep in touch.

I didn't feel sad about him. He wasn't dead, just back in Temple City. I didn't know him well enough to miss him. This was quite inconvenient.

In fact, I didn't miss anyone or anything. I just wanted to sleep.

But when I closed my eyes I was startled awake, dropped into a loneliness not unlike ice-water. I saw the blackberry seeds Mother had picked out of her pie and stirred on her white china plate, I heard Grandpa's diseased loop of repeated stories from the 1930s, I felt the silence of the strange, old street outside my window. The coils in my mattress celebrated their freedom after 15 years of folded storage, twinging and spiraling joyfully into my backbone. I thrashed the pillow, looking for a cool side. The sheets itched and smelled of mothballs. Everything here was rotting, stale, old. And then I knew what I missed: I missed normalcy, where the world, without question, centering on me and the excitement of my budding existence. I would rather have felt heartache or outrage, anything less selfish. I would much rather have felt my own bed, my clean, new, orange sheets, a mattress with less zealous springs.

Whether I closed my eyes or kept them open, I saw nonsensical piles of salvaged crap, their once-methodical system of organization lost in Grandpa's withering mind. And I saw my mother's face: her eyes misted over with a greifsoaked, overwhelmed haze. She hadn't shared any attack plan or timetable for our summer project. I wondered if she had one.

I did not want to think about it. I prayed, quite earnestly, for something to be larger than myself and this house, and for the springs in my mattress to stop jumping into my sternum. I found myself praying to the image of the gold and brown Yearbook Jesus...one of those terribly honest, easy prayers which left no record of words on my soul but still seemed heard.

---

In the morning, I found my mother transformed: wide-eyed, calm, and already sorting. She had plans, but no coffee, and I stood on the shag carpet blinking idiotically and watching her fingers fly through dust. I eyed the coffeemaker and exaggerated my yawns. When she realized she'd lost my attention, she paused.

"You don't drink coffee," she reminded me.

"I do sometimes. Just not at home. With friends...we go out for coffee."

"You get a milkshake with about 5000 calories crammed into it. That's not coffee. You don't like real coffee. We don't need it; it's not a good habit to start." She was, as usual, annoyingly spot-on and above any reproach : she herself never touched caffeine, let alone the Carmel Frappachinos she'd christened "Calories in a Cup."

"I think I'll go for a walk," I replied, secretly relieved. I hated the taste of pure coffee--it gave me the shakes.

"That's a good idea," she surprised me. "You need a little time for yourself. Come back around 8:30, and we'll start into the kitchen table."