I stepped through the front door of my grandmother’s mobile home and the stale piss smell of it engulfed me like a fishing net fresh from the water heaved heavy and wet over my body. It was dark as a pit.

I had just turned sixteen and MeMa wanted to see me for my birthday, but she and my mother weren’t speaking so I was there alone. Dad dropped me off in the warm June sun at the end of the overgrown crooked walkway and promised to return in an hour.

My eyes adjusted to the trailer’s gloom and MeMa’s third and most recent husband Charlie came into view, slumped in his wheelchair, parked on the cheap kitchen linoleum just to the right of the door. His ragged blue terrycloth robe, barely tied, hung open on top to reveal his scraggly grey chest hair and sagging breasts. Alzheimer’s was eating Charlie’s brain and he was going to die soon.

Years ago MeMa lived in a large canary yellow Victorian. As soon as her children had grown and flown she rented out the spare bedrooms. One of her boarders was an old drifter named Charlie who took the room at the top of the stairs. My room before my parents got their own place.

Whenever I visited, Charlie took me out to the front of the house and timed me with the second hand of his wristwatch as I ran sprints to the cracked sidewalk square at the corner of the block and back again. He regaled me with tales of winning medals in sprints when he was younger but the way he shuffled around, I couldn’t fathom it.

One evening he and MeMa sat on the threadbare sofa in the living room holding hands sheepishly in the decrepit glow of the faded brocade lampshades and announced to the family their intent to marry. They looked like two really old teenagers, twitchy under everyone’s stare but unable to help themselves. They’d known each other for no longer than a month and Charlie was even older than my grandmother. I thought of them having sex…two paper bags crumpling together in the night.

Almost immediately after their marriage, Charlie’s behavior changed. Late night phone calls from my grandmother. When I was over the house, Charlie sat at the kitchen table asking me, “How’s work down in Baltimore?” While MeMa thundered around looking for more food. Charlie started wandering out late, getting lost wearing nothing but his old man’s robe. The police brought him home most nights.

MeMa was already morbidly obese. 250 pounds, maybe. She had trouble with her knees and said she needed a place without stairs. I think she wanted to get Charlie out of town.

Consulting no one, MeMa sold the family home to the hospital up the street and cashed in the paltry sum to buy herself and her senile husband a trailer on a plot of land they would never own. Seventh identical white rectangle on the right, complete with wooden wishing-well, in the warm and welcoming Whispering Pines trailer park. It wasn’t even a doublewide.

The hospital plowed the family home under to create an extra parking lot.

I wasn’t brought to see my grandmother for years.

Now here I was, standing on the matted carpet just inside the front door of MeMa’s trailer. My mother’s mother had planted herself on the far side of the kitchen table. She was enormous. The light from the bay window at the end of the trailer was all but blotted out by her massive silhouette.

The heat in the place was a living thing that wheezed a reek of urine and body rot. I could hear a fan somewhere but I couldn’t feel it. Legions of white Entenmann’s boxes waited patiently within MeMa’s reach, contents half-eaten and sticky butter knives inside each at the ready.

Tabloids boasting vampire alien bat-babies and haggard celebrities awaited reading and recycling in piles stacked about the tabletop and on the floor around MeMa’s bare feet and swollen ankles. Her toenails were like thick yellow bear claws.

There were fat black flies buzzing over a dark greasy mass thickening in a pan on the Formica counter. I thought of the time MeMa sent over a crock-pot covered in tin foil, filled with homemade chicken soup as a peace offering to my mother. The entire family had a helping. It was good. My stepfather was spooning up his second serving when he stopped and spit the entire mouthful back into his bowl, “Maggots!” We gathered around as he stirred the ladle in the pot and watched the little white worms bob through the soup like rice.

MeMa opened her undulating arms to me and I shuffled reluctantly toward her embrace, passing Charlie in his wheelchair. He stared with coal black eyes at absolutely nothing at all. I could see the catheter tube poking out between the flaps in his robe. Ah fuck. I could see his balls.

I was suddenly self-conscious and ashamed of my glowing vitality in the dark hot death of that trailer. I felt too alive and new. Didn’t even have my driver’s license yet and here was Charlie nearly done with everything.

Only a week ago my first girlfriend and I snuck away to my bedroom while my parents cleaned up dinner. I lit the candles Lindsey had secreted in her purse and we disrobed each other one article at a time in the flickering light as Boyz-II-Men cooed softly from the tape player.

We lay on the fresh flannel sheets I’d put on my bed just for the occasion and there the smooth romance ended. Propped above Lindsey, perched on the precipice of something that had consumed my every thought, dream, breath, bite and swallow for six long adolescent years, I was overwhelmed. Entering Lindsey gave me vertigo. My vision swam. The room kept flipping. I kept losing my erection. It was painful for her. When we sort of got going, Mom called from downstairs, “AARON! We have to take Lindsey home!”

MeMa’s mushy arms encircled me and the cold clamminess tore me from my reverie. She squeezed me close.

“You know MeMa loves you.” She screamed into my ear as her hearing aid screeched.

Charlie started mumbling and rocking violently, rattling the flimsy trailer kitchen. I freed myself from MeMa’s gargantuan grasp. It was like shrugging off the affections of a cold sweaty Michelin Man. I looked over at Charlie. He met my gaze with wet pleading eyes, “Petey?”

Tears rolled down his cheeks, hopeless and silent. Sparkles of refracted light lodged in the stubble of neglect on his cheeks and chin.

I turned back to MeMa. She was always chewing on something nonexistent. Constantly moving her jaw. She chewed and shifted about as best she could. Her chair creaked and pleaded as she pulled my gift up from the floor beside her.

It was a blonde doll, in a blue dress, imprisoned in a cheap wood and plastic display case. Oh. So I had traveled down here to the third ring of Hell for a doll.

“She’s from the Franklin Mint, Aaron. She’s gonna be worth a lot of money. Take good care of her honey, and Aaron,” MeMa leaned in conspiratorially, practically yelling but thinking she was whispering, “don’t let your mother try to sell her.”

She sat back and pushed a foil-covered tray across the table toward me.

“I made you magic-squares! Your favorite, honey. Happy Birthday. MeMa loves you.” She nudged the tray closer to me and went back to chewing nothing.

Magic-squares used to be my favorite. But I could never trust anything from that kitchen.

Dad finally honked the horn of freedom and I did my best to mask my excitement saying good-bye to MeMa. I was already imagining that first breath of fresh air. And calling Lindsey when I got home.

I grabbed the pan of magic-squares and my new doll and beat a retreat. I couldn’t look at Charlie.

That week Lindsey and I boarded our separate school buses as if it were any other day. We had devised a new scheme. I felt like a bank robber en route to a rendezvous with my accomplice for the big job. The fields and forests blurred by. I sat still, backpack on my lap, trying not to vomit.

It was the last week of school. The warm morning sun smiled down promises of the long summer vacation ahead. Lindsey and I found each other amidst the scurrying crowd of kids disembarking from the buses. Then we booked it for the woods.

No parents. No clothes. In my backpack I carried blankets, condoms, and cookies in a Ziploc bag for snacks. Lindsey stood up and put on a grown-up nighty from home.

The long waves of her brown hair caught the light so warm and soothing I wanted to curl up in it and take a nap. I told her, “You’re a wood nymph without wings.”

So she danced a little around our blanket. She looked embarrassed so I pulled her down onto me and took the silky thing off of her. A true fairy of the woods.

There were no scars on our hearts and our bodies were brand new. Neither of us had ever given either of them away to anyone else. The sun seeped down through the green and kissed our perfect new skin while we rolled around fucking, over and over again, all day long, in love and all alone.

Charlie died in the fall. The Principal came and called me out of Spanish class.

I finally had my learner’s permit and my parents let me drive to the funeral. My first time driving on the highway. Crazy-quick and chaotic compared to the country back roads I was used to. Mom kept yelling at me to slow down.

At the funeral I helped carry Charlie’s casket. My very first funeral. The weight of the coffin startled me because I could feel something dead in there and I almost dropped it. A guy in a suit stepped up to help but somehow I kept hold of my handle and he left me alone.

Charlie was in a shiny box being lowered into a hole in the ground. Forever. The end. MeMa leaned on my uncle and cried.

I stood around with all the other sad people and I felt it too, but all I could think about was Lindsey the next night at the homecoming bonfire. Holding her hand in the heat of the blaze with chilly autumn at our backs. The contour of her breasts casting shadows from beneath a cozy sweater. The pockets of my acid-washed jean-jacket brimming with Big Red gum. Maybe we’d sneak off out of the firelight to fool around in the woods.

Aaron DiMunno came of age in the southwestern foothills of the Catskill Mountains. He made computer animated movies in a cubicle for twelve years. Now he is a creative nonfiction writer and itinerant worker living mostly in New York City. His writing can be found on The Nervous Breakdown, in The Knoxville Writers’ Guild 2011 Anthology and some other places too.