Blow (11 page)

There. Happily ever after. Finally.

B
UT MAYBE YOU’D
like to know how they went out. In the end, I mean, since all my stories end with everybody interred. It might seem like a gyp if I didn’t at least mention it.

Well, Pierre and Babbo became inseparable once they realized how much Pierre loved Italian food and Babbo loved French food. It doesn’t take much sometimes. They continued to work together in a shared work space, with Babbo talking nonstop and Pierre grunting a reply now and then.

As grandpas, they were doters. They spent so much time talking and thinking about the babies that they even changed their business. Instead of quilted flowers and painted marbles in vases, Babbo and Pierre teamed up to make the first mobiles Old Timey Europe had ever seen. Plush dolls, shiny painted beads — it made sense.

In addition, Babbo was expert in horsey and piggyback rides, while Pierre handled all the questions about why some rocks look like clouds and some clouds look like castles in the sky.

When I found Pierre in his study, still holding the quilted carnation his granddaughter had given him that night — her first ever — he saw me and sighed. “That was something. Did you see that? That was
really
something.”

Babbo picked me up in a bear hug when I came back for him a few months later. It was in the middle of a song, in the middle of dinner. He plopped me down and said, “Now, let’s go catch up with that French prune or he’ll think he’s beaten me.”

As for Chloe and Giacomo, they fell, too. You all do, eventually. And I guess what I’ve been saying is it doesn’t have to be so bad. You shake my hand. We talk. Dora gives you candy, and then you get what you came for.

I think the hope is that somewhere along the way, you craft yourself some love. Some of that thing you can only say what it is with laughing. And then you’re really sharing your life. So then you croak. So what?

Like Co-Co and Clo-Clo. They were old and holding hands — went together, if you’ll believe it. I still didn’t have any words for her, so she came up and kissed me on the cheek. She always had a way about that. And then she turned and said, “Hey, Co-Co, what did you have for lunch?”

And he said, “A Doom sandwich!”

Then the two idiots squish me in between them.

If you enjoyed this novella by Daniel Nayeri, you may also enjoy his other novellas published in e-book format:

Read all four novellas — including
Wood House,
available only in the printed book —
in
Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow

www.candlewick.com

DANIEL NAYERI
was born in Iran and spent a couple of years as a refugee before immigrating to the United States at age eight with his family. He is the co-author of a popular young adult series set in Manhattan that began with
Another Faust.
He has worked as a stuntman and a pastry chef and is now a writer and editor in New York City.

Of this collection, he says: “For me, stories can be about anything. In any medium. But they have to be in a world at least half as interesting as this one. The characters have to be a little tweaked, a little obsessed. I like people who are wildly broken or wildly uncomfortable or wildly hard to deal with. Everyone a little wild. That’s one reason why writing this whole thing on an iPhone makes a weird kind of sense. Each form of media out there is completely different, sure, but all my favorite books, games, movies, comics share the trait of great storytelling. And, hey, I’m into that. I’m pretty sure we’re all into that.”