“Nana, they didn’t pack the three o’clock nuts.” I braked my fourth-hand Chrysler Grand Voyager too hard onto the narrow shoulder. Nana Ludovica slammed backwards into the weed-infused foam of the ripped passenger seat. I didn’t mean to hurt the woman, but I was going to give her a nice day if it killed us both.

Besides, we were there.

After a spittle-drenched series of Romanian swears, Nana hunched to fiddle with the vents. “Is air conditioner or blow dryer?”

“Is this the place?”

“Is this what, Carmina?”

My forehead fell onto the backs of my hands on the steering wheel. “Nana, I’m Meggy. Momma is gone, remember? Is this the umbrella handle place?”

Nana lifted her boxy black sunglasses. Her irritable eyes, the color of grass in August, narrowed to reptilian slits like they did when she was feeling pissy. “No Army lunkhead fence.”

“The base closed. No more fence.”

“Is it three o’clock?”

“No!” Not a lie. It was three-oh-three.

Gazing forward, she tapped the dashboard twice. “Meggy, see.”

“That’s it, right?”

“That is rock look like cozonac.”

The sole boulder loomed like a lonely brioche-shaped sentry guarding the vast salty playa to the north. Neon yellow sand radiated from its base, just as unsettlingly vibrant as on my first trip out here, after the funeral when I got it in my head to bring Nana back to the place she’d always claimed was the site of the best day of my mom’s—Carmina’s— life.

The place my mother had never talked about.

“I’ll unload, then let’s go sit, huh?” I said.

We’d settle in the shadow of the orangish boulder and she would retell that crazy story, and we’d search and fail to find the fabled buried umbrella handle, then we’d head back to Sagebrush, her “memory management” home. Though I rarely visited, I loved the old Romanian bat. We shared those disapproving eyes and a sense of humor as dry as that baking earth.

Took ten minutes to make the short walk to the stone. I unfolded a chair that a suburban mom forgot in the back when I’d bought the Voyager, then bent to the beige, soft-sided sixer ice chest with the fancy-S Sagebrush logo (AND CONTAINING NO DAMN NUTS). I retrieved the box of Mott’s apple juice they did pack.

And immediately dropped it.

Nana had fallen to her knees into the funky dirt at the boulder’s base.

She batted me away with her gnarled mitt, caked yellow. She was okay.

She was digging.

“Never marry Army man,” she lectured as she grubbed.

My mother’s biological father, Ludovica’s first husband, Erik, ex-Army man, had been unkind. I knew little more. No one talked about Erik, though now I wondered if Nana’s decades-long grudge against the Army fence and Army Jeeps was a way to vent about her Army husband. Maybe the entire kooky story was.

“Buna?!”

She allowed her skeletal bottom to plunk onto the sand. With trembling arms, she raised the glimmering object.

“No freakin’ way,” I breathed.

The tale had not done it justice. Metallic, the size of half a bagel, it was not simply pink, but iridescent pink, a pink that palpitated without rhythm, staggering, the pulse of an irregular heartbeat. It looked like the pistol Barbie might have in her nightstand at the Dreamhouse.

“We were running away to my sister’s in Cali-fornya. Said him we go to store. Carmina had to make water, so we stop. Two teeny teeny pie plates flew here, fighting, zzz, zzz, shooting papanasi bullets, many colors. One plate crash. Your mother found this, then my husband drove up, found us. He furious.”

“The family says he bailed on you two after that day. Disappeared.”

“Disappeared like bug in zapper.”

“Really think it’s a teeny alien cannon?” I didn’t really think it was extraterrestrial tech, and neither did the family. An Army experiment in lighting extremely small raves, maybe.

“Who knows? But for people, it provider.” She deposited it in my hands.

The provider tingled, like if you could feel the ants in someone else’s sleeping arm.

“You’re lazy, but good girl. You try.”

Lazy. The family accused me of selfishness, of not visiting Nana enough, and not visiting Mom enough while cancer feasted on her brain. Today, Meggy The Avoidant would be utterly selfless.

“Nana, this is your day.”

I handed it back.

I mean, I didn’t think anything would actually happen.

The stuttering glow lit Nana’s craggy face. The meanness that had deepened as her daughter’s, and her own, mind diminished melted. “Carmina was seven. She thought it majie. Put it to chin, make wish. Zzz went that fool husband. Then here come Jeeps, looking for pie plates. We bury, then drive away in hurry. I always thought they found it. Idiots.”

Nana touched it to her chin. As if it tickled, she laughed, a rare sound. Then, with a shockingly gentle smile, Nana offered it again.

“My turn, huh? Ooh. Provide me a new car and a boyfriend that’s super tolerant, and…”

“Tsk, Meggy. You can get on your own.” Nana dunked her fingers into a tube-shaped bag of Kirkland Mixed Nuts.

Hold up. “Where’d you get those?”

A Corvette blew by.

“Keep driving that way maniac, see where it gets you!” Nana snarled.

I held the handle to my chin, serious now.

For starters, provide me a Mercedes. Sexy and cool. Black, please.

No tickling buzz. My Grand Voyager had not become any grander.

Nana’s right. I could get that on my own, eventually. How about: I wish Mom was here, alive and fine.

The bubblegum swirls faded. The family legend now looked like a rusty curl of rebar.

Heavy.

“It worked when it needed to, Carmina,” Nana said, popping a salty walnut. “Now bury. Before Jeeps comes.”

I didn’t tell her no Jeeps were coming.

I buried the dead legend.

And responded to my mother’s name the rest of the drive back to Sagebrush.

Patrick R. Wilson is an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA). He lives in Austin, Texas.