and all the other guests how to make a birdhouse. This year, his lesson was how to build a working robot, and I missed it. I missed the best parts about summer, thanks to Bat Springs Fever.
Soon enough, I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I had to start peeing in an empty Coke bottle Dad found at the dump. Grandma Raquel was so frustrated. She couldn’t believe the sock thing, and everything else she told me to do wasn’t working.
“Grandma,” I said to her one night before she went home. “Your advice is lousy.”
“Lyndon Baines Juan Perez, listen to me,” she said. “I grew up on a farm in El Paso. I got every disease you can think of! I used to sleep next to cow pies! Have you tried that yet?”
“Where am I going to get cow pies, Grandma?”
“Sleep next to your father,” she grunted.
“Grandma, stop.”
“I can hear you!” Dad said from the living room.
“Ma! Eddie isn’t a cow pie!” Mom joined in. Grandma Raquel patted my head with her handkerchief. It used to be Great-Grandpa Armando’s.
“It’s getting late, nieto. I’ll see you in the morning. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Grandma, even though you make me do weird things, I like it when you visit me. Keep visiting me.”
She did keep visiting me, and sometimes she brought homemade chocolate chip cookies, and even though they were good, I could only eat one or two before I felt queasy. If she didn’t bring cookies, she brought coloring books, crossword puzzles, and word searches. When she didn’t bring anything, she told me about our family’s long history in Texas. She said her great-grandfather was a good friend of Juan Seguin and her great-grandmother once cooked dinner for Sam Houston.