DAD: Gus Willard wasn’t elected Mayor, Mother.

GRANDMA: He wasn’t?

DAD: He lost the election by an impressive margin. The biggest ever.

GRANDMA: I knew him!

DAD: He was never the Mayor.

DAD exits up the stairs.

GRANDMA: I knew him! Every time I saw him and talked to him I believed I was seeing and talking to the Mayor!

She laughs.

Then later the ex-Mayor…

She sighs.

Don’t ever get old, Grandson.

CASS: Very few are betting that I will.

GRANDMA: There’s no percentage to the deal after a certain point…

CASS: Grandma, will you cut out the light? (She does; lights very low now.) Speaking of the past…

GRANDMA sighs.

CASS: Somewhere in here in this visit we better all sit around and talk out the past.

GRANDMA: The tragic side of life…

CASS: We have to deal with all that. Or some, anyways.

GRANDMA: That’s what you said your last time around at the Starlight.

CASS: And did we deal with it? No.

GRANDMA: Yes!

CASS: No.

GRANDMA: I thought we did. It seems like we had enough of a powwow over it that your brothers both got in jail that night.

CASS: That’s just our way of ducking the main thing. Get arrested.

GRANDMA: Huh! Talk sense!

CASS: I’ve had trained and certified counselors point that out to me, Grandma. More people escape into prison than ever escape out.

GRANDMA: Don’t you let anybody tell you how to do like. You make up your own mind how you’re going to be baptized and follow the Lord and don’t get mixed up too deep in the Alcoholic Anonymous or the Narcotic Anonymous. “I am the way, the truth, and the light,” sayeth Our Lord Jesus Christ. And anybody that don’t clearly invoke his name is doing the work of the Devil Satan from down in Hell. That’s from the Bible. Can your counselors go back in a time-travel device to Cherokee County, North Carolina? If they can’t do that, then tell them to let me alone. It started to go bad when we all left Cherokee County.

CASS: I never left Cherokee County.

GRANDMA: Well, that’s because you were never there.

CASS: I was never there. That’s my point.

GRANDMA: Arthur Cassandra and I should never have made a move into Texas. The Nantahala Mountains will ever be my natural home.

CASS: Well, I’m from Texas as my home. You never should’ve brought us to California.

GRANDMA: I was brought same as you.

CASS: California made my mother crazy.

GRANDMA: Your mother never even got inside California.

CASS: Just the idea of it made her crazy.

Pause.

Don’t cry, Grandma.

GRANDMA: I get through the days pretty good. I just don’t like the nighttime. Why did Johnny go?

CASS: I don’t know.

Pause.

GRANDMA: Jay Leno is all right, I don’t mean to insult anybody. But I just don’t like the nighttime anymore, and I never will. Actually, that Conan makes me laugh. He’s just a little boy. But that’s what’s sad about him, he’s just a boy, and it’s so late at night.