“Nails?” she said. “You want to see nails, you go back to when I was your age. I was the hardest thing this side of a diamond. Sometimes I look at you, and I remember back the way I was.”

I stopped laughing. I hadn’t been kidding when I said that she never jawed to me much. A story here about how my dad was when he was a little boy, a joke there about my parents after they were married, but granny was tough, quiet. She’d lead a hard life and I guess I just assumed she didn’t much want to have to live it again in words.

“The city got bad in your life, Makayla, that’s for sure, but before then it was bad in a different way. A way that nobody talked about unless they were on the wrong side of it. It was just white here, black there. Rich here, poor there. In the neighborhoods and in the schools, in the way we ate and the way we got arrested, in the parks we went to and the beaches we swam at. That was just how it was.

“I was twelve when the first boy I knew got shot by the cops. He lived down the hall from me in the housing project. He was sleeping on the couch in the front room of his apartment because that’s where he slept when his baby sisters were born. They said his daddy was selling drugs, and when the cops came into that room, guns firing, they didn’t care who they were shooting. They put six holes in him, and he didn’t even die right away. I heard him screaming when the ambulance finally came to take him away, and when it took him away we didn’t see him ever again. The only drugs they found in that apartment were a little bit of pot his daddy smoked. That was a hell of a trade, a twelve-year-old boy’s life for less than an ounce of weed.”

“Fuck, Granny,” I said. “I never knew that.”

“Why would I tell you that? You think I didn’t hear that boys screams in my dreams for years? You think those were sounds I want to remember? I can hear them now, plain as they were then.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute, just sipped our beers. We sure weren’t laughing anymore.