Basin Street Blues by Kat Saunders

I rapped sharply on the door to Room 324. After a few moments, I knocked again, rubbing my slick palms against the hem of my dress. What’s taking so long, I thought with irritation.

At last, the door opened. A middle-aged, heavyset man regarded me with a bewildered expression.

“Are you alone?” I asked, realizing that this was the wrong question to ask a stranger, especially a stranger whose hotel room door I was leaning against so my legs wouldn’t buckle.

“Yes,” he said, an edge of expectation in his voice. He wetted his lips with his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I have the wrong room.” Before he could say anything else, I sprinted down the hallway toward the elevator, jamming my thumb several times against the “down” button, willing the elevator to swallow me. 

Inside the elevator car, I called him—Sean, the man I was supposed to be meeting. “I went to Room 324 and some weird guy answered the door,” I said, my voice breathless.

“Are you sure you’re at the right hotel?” 

“Yes, I’m at the Hampton Inn.”

“Oh, my bad,” he said. “I’m actually at the Holiday Inn. It’s across the street.” How could he have made such a massive mistake? The strange man in Room 324 could have robbed me or worse. But I had grown accustomed to Sean’s carelessness, and now, I expected nothing different. Earlier that evening, I’d driven an hour from my parents’ house to meet him in Streetsboro, Ohio, and the trip had already been marked by bad omens. I’d gotten lost several times; the GPS didn’t recognize the hotel address. I was already more than an hour late for our date. And I’d dressed in a gauzy black dress with puff sleeves, printed in tiny yellow flowers. It was the dress I’d worn two weeks earlier to my grandmother’s funeral. 

***

When I was fifteen, Granny had arrived at my parents’ house in Ohio as Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—where our family had once lived together. She was supposed to return to the city once the water receded, but she was so frail our family didn’t think she would survive the trip back to Louisiana. Granny had always been a small woman—112 lbs. and just under five feet tall. But she’d shrank even more since the last time I’d seen her, and she seemed to be vanishing in her Alfred Dunner pantsuit, unable to stand up or walk without assistance. When I greeted her with a kiss, she didn’t recognize me.

My mother and her siblings decided to move Granny into a palatial nursing home near our house––one with large, white columns that were supposed to make the place look grand. The plaster just looked cheap. The Home’s circular drive was wide and long enough to accommodate the ubiquitous ambulances and hearses idling in front of its automatic front doors. Over the five years Granny lived there, the Home changed its name several times. Each new name sounded statelier than the one before, as if the Home was a resort or a sprawling English country manor—not a place where people came to eat cabbage rolls and die. 

“The food isn’t very good at this hotel,” Granny said when we visited her for Sunday dinners, after it became too difficult for her to visit my parents at our house. On one of her final visits, after a supper of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and yeast rolls, she had locked herself in the bathroom and then couldn’t remember how to get out. After an hour, my mother was finally able to pick the lock. My father worried he’d have to kick down the door.

“You’re right,” I said, lifting a fork of wilted green beans. Across the table, one of the other residents, Bernice, considered a silk flower centerpiece before devouring its petals.

“Look at that nut,” Granny said out of the side of her mouth. “I can’t believe they let people like that in a nice place like this.”

***

In the Holiday Inn parking lot, I considered driving home. If I left right away, I could still make it in time to watch Jeopardy! That whole summer, I’d thought only of Sean, crying over him nearly every day. We’d agreed that what we had was just a fling; I was finishing my freshman year of college, and he was set to graduate with a degree in psychology. But I’d grown attached to him because he was dynamic, funny, and—most importantly—troubled. 

Sean had lived in a filthy apartment with four roommates. The building had once been a church, evidenced by its odd angles and stained-glasses windows. That spring, Sean taught me how to sneak into bars and order cocktails. I cleaned his apartment and used my meal plan to swipe him into the campus dining halls. He always ate Fruit Loops, the cereal discoloring the milk at the bottom of his bowl, green or pink. We’d pass long evenings on his bedroom floor, holding hands and stroking his cat, Odessa. We drank jugs of bad wine and watched a lot of sad French movies. When the movies made me cry, Sean held me and I nuzzled his neck. Odessa over-turned cups of sour wine and ash as I slept beside Sean. She lapped at the mixture of spilled ash-wine.

Since we’d broken up at the end of the school year, Sean had spent the summer burning through the money in his trust fund. I’d been taking an algebra class, in a building that smelled of chalk and armpits. As I factored polynomials, he was winning and losing big in Vegas. As I tried and failed to memorize the quadratic formula, he was spending what was left of his money on cocaine, and, from what mutual friends had told me, heroin. But now, at the end of the summer, he had a real job, working as a land analyst for his best friend’s father. I believed what I wanted to—that this was an indication that he was better and healthy. He’d traveled to Streetsboro on a business trip, his first since getting hired. And, he’d told me, he was lonely. He needed some company and he knew I’d come.

Instead of leaving, I walked across the parking lot and into the hotel lobby. The woman behind the front desk smiled at me.

“Can I help you?” she asked. 

I spied a tray of chocolate chip cookies beside her and thought about taking one. “No, I’m here to meet someone,” I said, hoping she realized I wasn’t a hooker, just someone who gave it away for free. 

“Of course,” she said.

For the second time that night, I stood before a door marked 324. I only knocked once before Sean answered. He was wearing an unbuttoned dress shirt and olive green slacks. He looked better than I expected, not at all like someone in the midst of a drug bender.

“You look great,” he said, pulling me into an awkward half-hug. I followed him into the room, which smelled of cigarettes even though the room was on a non-smoking floor. There were two queen-sized beds in the room, and I sat on the still-made one. A large painting of some flowers hung on the wall above the beds. It was ugly.

“You want a beer?” he asked. 

“Sure,” I said, accepting a Rolling Rock. It was warm, but I appreciated having something to occupy my hands.

***

Just before Granny’s health declined for the final time, I visited her at the Home with two chocolate-covered coconut clusters from a box at my parents’ house. We had to ration them because otherwise she’d eat the whole box in one sitting. 

“My favorite,” she exclaimed, biting into one and wrapping the other in a napkin for later. She was wearing a green jacket embroidered with red cardinals across the front. Granny had always loved birds. Before Alzheimer’s, she’d begun a birds of America quilt—a square for every state’s bird. She never finished the quilt. She never patched Ohio’s red cardinals.

“I know,” I said. “They’re my favorite, too.” She and the other residents were in their wheelchairs, parked in front of the television in the recreation room. A VHS of sing-along songs played on the screen. 

“Now, I want to hear you all singing and clapping along!” the Home’s activity director said, beaming. Many of the residents had been wheeled into the room against their wills and dozed in their wheelchairs.

Normally, Granny would turn to me and scoff, muttering, “Get a load of those idiots.” Granny liked to play Bingo, winning cans of Shasta cola, which she hoarded in her dresser. Otherwise, she didn’t care to participate in the Home’s activities. But that day, she clapped and hummed to the old standard, “Basin Street Blues,” which blared from the television. Granny sang along in a low, reedy voice. She’d never been much for singing even though she loved musicals, especially the ones starring Gene Kelly. She smiled, a toothless grin. Granny had lost her false teeth shortly after moving into the Home, and she’d long ago abandoned wearing red lipstick. 

“Julia, you sing so nicely,” the activity director said, just as surprised as I was to hear Granny sing. But why shouldn’t she sing a song about home—her real home—in New Orleans, the city where both of us had been born and couldn’t return? “Basin Street Blues” was about reuniting with old friends, forgetting worries on the Mississippi River. I could only clap in time because I didn’t know the words.

***

In Sean’s hotel room, I listened with mild interest as he told me about his job. The position would involve constant travel—a new town in Ohio nearly every night. As he spoke, I noticed the stubbed-out cigarettes filling a paper coffee cup turned ashtray, the empty beer bottles stacked in the trashcan. 

“How have you been?” he asked. 

“Not great,” I said. Since the last time I’d seen Sean Granny had died. I had turned twenty, and he hadn’t even bothered to wish me a happy birthday. I’d been lonely since moving back in with my parents for the summer––away from the new friends I’d made at college. I’d struggled to pass math. I’d strung along a guy who often joined me for coffee after class because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was great, but he just wasn’t Sean.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I guess you know I’ve been having problems with drugs and that’s why I’ve been unavailable,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, quietly.

“It’s not because I don’t care,” he said, and I thought of the text I’d sent him, drunkenly, a few weeks earlier. Do you hate me?, I’d asked, hurt by Sean’s long silences and terse messages when he bothered to respond. “Now that I have a job, I have a better outlook on things. I’m getting better. You know?” 

“Sure,” I said.

***

At the beginning of August, a few weeks after she sang “Basin Street Blues,” Granny fell ill. 

“I bet she’ll die on my birthday,” my mother said, a bleak situation seeming even grimmer. 

But my mother was wrong. Granny died six days before my mother’s birthday. That night, I’d skipped dinner—another casserole dropped off by my mother’s well-meaning friends. I was tired of carving a single portion from the dishes and microwaving a plate, my dinner never fully warm in the center. I ate alone as the others kept vigil beside Granny’s bed in the Home. My mother’s brother and sister had flown into town, and we were all just waiting for Granny to die.

Instead of joining them, I drove the back roads aimlessly, as I usually did. Cruising alone was one of my few hobbies that summer. That night, day faded slowly, giving way to some of the season’s last lightning bugs. I counted deer carcasses in varying states of decomposition: some were still stiff at the edges of the road, others were almost liquified. 

When I returned home, the family’s cars were parked in the driveway. It was too early for them to be back, and I knew what that meant before they told me. 

“I’m so sorry,” my mother said, stretching out her arms. I allowed her to hug me without returning her embrace. In the kitchen, my father mixed me a gin and tonic. Recently, my parents had started letting me drink with them at the house. After Granny got sick, I drank a lot of their gin after they went upstairs to bed. If they noticed the dwindling bottle of Tanqueray, they didn’t say anything. 

We all sat up to watch the local news out of Cleveland, and it was mostly bad as usual. Nobody felt much like eating, so I returned the untouched casserole to the fridge. After more cocktails, my family went upstairs to bed, exhausted and likely a little relieved.

In the kitchen, I tilted the bottle of gin to my glass again, relishing its juniper burn as I swallowed. My stomach ached—a gnawing hunger—so I rummaged through the kitchen pantry for food and discovered the box of coconut clusters I’d doled out carefully to Granny. I opened the box and shoved every remaining cluster in my mouth. 

After I was certain everyone else was asleep, I crawled from the house, wearing only my nightgown, onto the driveway. Alone, I allowed myself to weep.

***

When we finished our beers, Sean asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t, but I told him I was because I wanted him to take me out.

“I thought we could go somewhere nice,” he said, as I reached for my purse.

Somewhere nice turned out to be a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. We sat across from each other in an uncomfortable booth. My legs stuck to the cracked red vinyl. I still wasn’t hungry, but I ordered a dozen hot wings. They arrived steaming, a ghastly, unnatural shade of pink. Sean picked his chicken bones clean. Sauce stained his chin. He wiped his fingertips with a wet wipe. I glumly picked at one of my own wings.

“Are you going to finish those?” he asked.

“They’re yours,” I said, sliding my plate towards him. 

***

We held a funeral for Granny in Pittsburgh, where her husband, my grandfather, is buried. We made a  small group of mourners: just immediate family and the Presbyterian minister from the church where I’d been confirmed as a teenager. During the two-hour car ride, my cousin’s children chattered incessantly. They were too young to understand the gravity of the occasion, and they’d barely known Granny, their great-grandmother. I closed my eyes, walling out their noise. Granny’s death had hardly been unexpected, but before her, I’d only mourned goldfish and hamsters, remains small enough to flush or bury in a candy tin. 

We arrived at the gravesite, cut into the side of a characteristically steep Pittsburgh hill. Many years ago, Granny had asked my mother to simply scatter her ashes over the grave and forego the ceremony of an internment. “Because she was too cheap to buy an urn,” my mother had explained. Despite Granny’s wishes, she was interred in an urn my mother selected from a catalog in the funeral director’s office. This was not a New Orleans funeral with a second line, trays of petit fours and squares of red velvet cake, and a burial above the ground. There had been no calling hours, no wake. Her few friends from the Home were either dead themselves or too frail to make the journey. In lieu of flowers, my mother requested donations be made to the Home’s activities fund.

“Here,” my mother said, handing me a handkerchief edged with lace. It remained balled in my hand. The minister spoke kindly and carefully about Granny. It was a perfectly nice service, kept appropriately brief considering he didn’t know the woman he was speaking about. I stared at the minister’s bald, gleaming head. My cousin’s kids played loudly at a not-quite respectful distance. 

When the minister said “Amen,” we turned to leave, ascending the hill. My aunt stumbled, fell backwards, and twisted her ankle. Her hose ran and she hobbled for the rest of the day. Grave dirt clung to the soles of her shoes.

Afterward, we ate dinner at a dingy Italian restaurant in a private room. I assumed that the restaurant staff thought it was better to sequester us in case we became hysterical in our grief. 

I ordered pasta Alfredo, twirling fettucine on my fork without raising it to my mouth. The shrimp were shriveled and gummy. In my purse, my cell phone buzzed. A text from that boy from the nice boy from summer school, telling me how sorry he was for my loss. At the other end of the table, one of my cousin’s kids flung a piece of garlic toast across the room. Snot flowed from his nose. Nobody paid any attention. Granny would have told him to knock it off or else she’d beat the hell out of him, I thought.

***

After dinner, I went back to the hotel with Sean. In the elevator, our hands brushed as we both pressed the button for the third floor. A vein in my neck pulsed. In his room, he reclined on the unmade bed, but I chose the untouched bed again, sitting with my legs tightly crossed. Maybe there was something to the bedroom set-ups in old movies—couples sleeping in separate twin beds, a nightstand acting as a barrier between them. 

“Do you want another beer?” Sean asked.

“I’d better not. I have to drive home,” I said. He lit a cigarette in response. 

“You know I feel horrible about how things ended between us,” he said after a long silence.

“So do I,” I said.

“I’m surprised you came, but I’m so glad that you’re here.”  

“You know you can always call me when you’re lonely.” I meant it, even though I knew that when I was lonely I could never reach him.

“What do you say we do something about the distance between us?” He patted the duvet beside him. I hesitated for only a moment before surrendering, padding across the floor and laying down beside him. “Give me your hands,” he said. “I’ve missed them. Hooking his fingers through mine, he traced the lines etched across my palms. I kissed him, running my hands through his brown curls. When he unzipped my dress, I didn’t stop him.

After Sean and I were finished, we lay in the dark. He passed me his cigarette and I tried not to burn a hole in the cheap sheets. I inhaled too deeply and coughed. 

“I wish you could stay,” he said.

“I told my parents I’d be home by midnight,” I said.

“Sometimes I forget you’re only nineteen,” he said.

“I’m twenty.”

“Right,” he said, and laughed. 

I rescued my sandals from under the bed. Sean helped zip my dress, shrouding me again. His breath was hot against the nape of my neck.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said. “I think that’s the gentlemanly thing to do.” In the hotel lobby, I passed the woman at the front desk again. 

“Good night!” she said cheerily, but I couldn’t look at her. Outside, the late August air was hot and heavy. Mosquitoes bit my bare arms and I swatted them away. Sean kissed me on the lips and then again on the forehead. His arms encircled my waist.

“I’ll call you,” he said, before turning to leave.

I wanted badly to believe him, but I knew I was wearing a dress better suited for mourning.

Kat Saunders lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where she works as the assistant editor at Kent State University Press. Her writing has appeared in Harpur Palate, Into the Void, Cleaver, and other publications.