At-Risk

Some Other Kind of Happiness

some other kind of happiness No one holds the syringe but me. My mother could if she weren’t so squeamish about blood. There was a time when my cousin Tony could have learned to, but he came home to Brooklyn that summer a stranger. He’d been away all year at a boarding school in Connecticut none of us had ever seen. This left only Teddy, and even a blind woman could have seen that he coveted the hypodermic for his own. Teddy, my grandmother’s youngest son, and his newest girlfriend, Karen, were at the kitchen table playing backgammon. “What you doing?” Teddy asked. “Nothing.” I opened the refrigerator door and bottles of cloudy insulin jostled in the built-in depressions meant for holding eggs. “You about to give it to her?” “Throw the dice,” Karen said. “It’s your turn.” “Want me to help?” he asked. “No thanks,” I said, warming a bottle of insulin between my 114 | Some Other Kind of Happiness palms. “How long you all gonna be in here? I gotta clean the kitchen soon.” “I still say you’re too young to be doing this,” he said, shaking the leather dice cup. “You could accidentally stick yourself and get hurt. You don’t even know what you’re doing.” “I’m real careful,” I said, willing to say anything to keep him away from us. My grandmother waited in the back bedroom, watching soap operas until time for her injection. She kept the box of syringes in the top drawer of her bureau so no one could get to it without going across her bed. She removed one from the box and handed it to me. Giving her the needle has taught me to be patient and gentle. You need to be in order to handle someone else’s flesh. Daily handling has taught me well. I have been giving my grandmother her insulin twice a day for over a year now; I know her skin better than my own. I know when to move on before her skin gets sore; I know when to let her skin lie fallow. The outer upper arm, where even the most toned woman jiggles, is the best spot. There is always enough there to grasp, always extra meat to cushion the needle’s prick. “This won’t hurt,” I whispered, talking to her arm and not her. I pushed my grandmother’s short sleeve up her arm and held a piece of flesh. “Don’t you worry. This won’t hurt a bit.” I swabbed the skin with alcohol. By now Teddy was in the doorway , watching, eyeing the syringe as I pulled the orange cap off and filled the hypodermic with insulin. “What you want?” I asked him. “I don’t have to want nothing,” he said. “I’m in my mama’s room, in my mama’s house.” Teddy moved in with us more than a year before Tony went away to school. After his previous girlfriend kicked him out, Teddy ended up outside our door, begging for a place to stay just until he could Some Other Kind of Happiness | 115 get himself back on his own two feet. His mother, my grandmother, was the only one who would take him in. No one else in our family trusted him; his older brother, Ralph, had stolen from too many family members to support his habit, and our relatives were wary that Teddy would do the same. He was given Tony’s room to share and in Tony’s absence he had painted it electric blue and hung his ten-speed bike from the ceiling. He showed no signs of getting back on his own two feet or of leaving anytime soon. “Now cut it out you two,” my grandmother said. “This baby’s got to concentrate. Don’t want her to give me the wrong amount.” “Gram, you know I wouldn’t do that,” I said, wounded. My grandmother patted my hand. “I know, I know,” she said. “But she could, Mama. You could go into some kind of shock or diabetic coma or something. Naima could send you right into the hospital.” “You shut up!” I screamed. “Ain’t nobody going to no hospital today,” my grandmother said. “If you’re going to talk that kind of talk, you can leave us in peace. I don’t need to be...