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“People get over strokes all the time,” she says.

“That’s right,” Dad says. “All the time.” But he doesn’t sound so certain.

“They probably didn’t have a stroke and cancer both,” I say, and Colleen’s like, “Now don’t be negative, Ceejay. We need to keep Grandma in our prayers, and everything will work out.”

I start to argue about the prayer deal, but decide maybe it’s not such a bad idea. I could at least try one for Mom’s sake. So in my head I’m like, God, I know maybe I’m not the best person to do the asking, but could you get things to turn out all right with Grandma? Plus, since we’re talking, could you look after Bobby while I’m gone? He needs it.

I open my eyes and look out the side window—fences, rolling hills, cows. If God was listening, he doesn’t show any sign of it.

When we finally reach the hospital after the long drive, the parking lot is scorching hot. It’s been over a hundred degrees for five days straight. The sky is as frayed and faded as ragged denim, and the sunlight explodes off the windows of the parked cars. I’m thinking it should be dreary and raining for the kind of business we have here, but somehow this seems even more depressing.

Inside, we wind through the halls till we come to the intensive care unit, where Grandma’s supposed to be. There are two
rows of people in their beds, some with drapes pulled around them and some right out in the open with all sorts of hoses hooked up to them. They’re dying, I guess. This is the first time I’ve been around something like this. When my step-grandpa died, we just went up for the funeral and came home. There was nothing to it. But now death is hanging around like some kind of big, fat cop who doesn’t know anything but rules.

Drew’s like, “This place is weird,” and I pop him on the back of the head.

“Grow some manners,” I tell him.

Grandma, Mom, and Lacy are nowhere in sight, and I can tell by the look on Dad’s face he’s thinking the same thing I am—we got here too late. Dad asks a nurse where Grandma is, and it turns out she’s been moved to a room on the third floor.

“Well, that must be good,” I say. “She must be better.”

The nurse mumbles a long
uhhhh
, and looks at Dad.

“Oh, I see,” he says.

As we walk away, I’m like, “What is it? I mean, if they moved her to another room, she must be better, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Dad says.

“Why else would they move her?”

He stops and looks me in the face. “Because there’s nothing else they can do for her here.”

When we walk into Grandma’s room, Mom and Lacy look up from their chairs on either side of the bed. They’re obviously drained. Mom’s hair is actually a little bit messed up, and Lacy looks like she hasn’t slept in about a month. Grandma’s unconscious, has been since yesterday, and looks even more shrunken than the last time I saw her. Tubes run from hanging bags down to her arms. More tubes help her breathe. This doesn’t look like anything you come back from.

When Mom starts to get up, Dad tells her to stay there—he knows she’s tired—but Lacy pops up, comes straight over, and hugs me.

“I’m glad you’re here, Ceejay.”

I’m thinking, Jesus, first Mom and now Lacy. Will the hugs never end? But the weird thing is that it really isn’t so weird. It actually feels natural to hug her back. Like all the distance that usually wedges itself between us has collapsed. She needs a jolt of strength from someone, and I’m her sister, so it’s only right to give it to her.

Colleen goes into her story about her husband’s grandpa again, and Mom’s like, “That’s right. People do come back from strokes.” But she’s like Dad—it sounds as if she doesn’t really believe it will happen this time.

The room is small and really crowded with all of us in there, so Dad persuades Mom and Lacy to go to the cafeteria for a break. Drew goes with them, leaving me and Dad and Colleen behind. At first I can’t help but wonder what the deal is—why do people gather around and watch someone who doesn’t even know you’re there? But as Colleen and Dad do their small-talk thing, I watch Grandma and start thinking maybe on some level she is aware of us. I mean, even with all our differences, we are family and that counts for something, right?

With her bony arms and hollowed face, she doesn’t look like the same plump, angry woman who took my skates away from me and wouldn’t give them back. The cancer and the stroke have stripped that away, and now she’s just a person. Maybe way down inside, she’s still fighting for her life, and I can’t help wondering what that’s about. There’s no hope left, really. None. So what is that thing inside that keeps people hanging on even when everything seems so impossible?

For a long moment, Grandma’s breathing stops, and I’m
thinking this is it—she’s gone—but then her lungs seem to catch, and the strained breathing starts up again. The fight continues.

That’s the way it goes all afternoon. We stay by her in shifts. Finally, at dinnertime, we go out to eat, everybody but Mom. When we return, Mom is standing in the hall outside Grandma’s room. She looks stunned, lost.

“I just went out of the room for a second,” she says, her voice shaking. “I needed a drink. When I came back …” And that’s all she can get out before the tears overtake her and she falls into Dad’s arms.

“What happened?” Drew says. No one answers right away, so he asks again and I tell him Grandma’s gone.

“Gone?” he says. “Gone where? I didn’t think she could walk.”

I glare at him and shake my head. The truth dawns on him. “Oh, that kind of gone.”

Mom’s sobbing in Dad’s arms. “I should’ve been with her. I didn’t want her to go alone like that.”

Dad strokes her back. “Maybe she felt like she couldn’t move on with us standing around her,” he says. “She might’ve just been hanging on for us.”

Lacy collapses into a chair against the wall. She’s not crying. She’s just staring ahead, and I swear she looks way older than the day she left Knowles to come up here and care for Grandma. She might even look older than me. I’m no expert about these things, but there’s been so much hugging going on lately, I figure I can’t go wrong if I sit beside her and wrap my arm around her shoulder. She leans her head against me and grabs hold of my free hand. I’m not sure how long something like this is supposed to last, but I guess I’ll keep it up as long as she needs it.

The funeral is scheduled for three days later. Mom and Lacy stay in Davenport to take care of the arrangements and look after the house. It’s Dad’s job to call people in Knowles to let them know what happened. All sorts of food—cakes, pies, even hams—come in from various church people. I figure Miss Big Tits Diane Simmons is bound to show up with a casserole and a giant helping of cleavage, but when I tell Uncle Jimmy that, he says not to worry—Dad doesn’t want anything to do with her.

I’m like, “What do you mean? You’re the one who told me he’s not too old for temptation and all that.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I was just really thinking about myself when I said that.”

“But I’ve been watching him,” I say. “It’s like she has a spell
on him. Last time she was over I caught them at the kitchen table, and she was poking a carrot stick in his mouth, all flirty and everything. And he just grinned like a fool. I almost stayed home. It was like I thought I should stay there and be their chaperone.”

Uncle Jimmy looked thoughtful for a second. “I wasn’t going to tell you this. Your dad told me not to tell anyone, but you need to know it. The thing is Diane Simmons won’t be bringing food over at all.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that.”

“It’s a fact. Your dad told her not to.”

“Why would he do that?”

Uncle Jimmy scratches his chin, weighing whether he should go on, before he does. “Because that last time she came over—the carrot-stick time—she ended up laying a big, wet kiss on your dad when he wasn’t expecting it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

He shakes his head. “And not only that, she jammed her hand right down between his legs. He said it felt like she was giving him a physical. He jumped up so fast, he about knocked the table over.”

My face burns. “That bitch.”

“Yeah,” Uncle Jimmy says. “And then she starts laughing and telling him she knows how much he wants it and how she wants it too, and starts unbuttoning her blouse. Swear to God, I’m not making this up. She says she’s not expecting anything but a little fun on the side. But your old man, he wasn’t having any of it. He laid the law down, told her to march herself right back out to her car and to never come back. Told her he loved his wife and he loved his kids, and he wasn’t about to let any big pair of tits mess that up.”

“He said that?”

“Pretty much. And I’ll tell you what, as a man who has let a big pair of tits lead him down the wrong road too many times, I can’t tell you how much I admire your dad for being able to do that. I mean, I might fight and screw and just in general get rowdy, but your dad’s a stronger man than I am any day.”

Obviously Uncle Jimmy’s all proud of my dad and everything, but I’m like, “Really? How much strength does it take just to do the thing you ought to do in the first place? Is that something to be proud of? It’s like bragging that you don’t rob liquor stores or kick babies.”

“You’re young, Ceejay,” he says. “You don’t know. Maybe someday you’ll find out.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this—if she comes back around, she’s going to get an earful from me.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Huh-uh. That’s exactly what you can’t do. You can’t say anything about this to anyone. Maybe later your dad will tell your mom, but it sure isn’t anything she needs to find out about right now. The best thing you can do is just keep it to yourself no matter how hard that is.”

I know he’s right. It’ll be hard, but I have to do it.

I’ll have to do something else too, and it’ll be just as hard, maybe harder. I’ve been elected to call Bobby about going to the funeral. Back when we were going to visit Grandma, I knew he’d never go, but a funeral is different. It’s like a duty, so I figure I’ll have to do my best to talk him into it this time.

When I call Dani’s place, he’s actually there for a change instead of hanging out with the captain. They had to exchange the engine they ordered for Angelica, and now they’re waiting for the new one to come in. The captain is still real down about the situation, but Bobby figures the new engine will change everything. He could go on about that for another thirty minutes, but I have to break in and tell him about Grandma. His
response is, “Well, they say only the good die young, and Grandma sure wasn’t young.”

Now, okay, Grandma was kind of like our adversary all this time, but that’s still pretty cold, especially since she just died. It really rubs me the wrong way. I’m like, “Come on, Bobby, don’t talk like that. I know you and her had your differences, but she’s still Mom’s mom. And I think she did change there at the end. Besides, it was pretty intense seeing her lying in that hospital bed looking so frail, trying to hang on just for her family’s sake and all. You have to let bygones be bygones at a time like this.”

Bobby snorts a laugh at that. “She might’ve been hanging on for Mom, but she sure wasn’t hanging on for you and me. You know how it’s always been, Ceejay, you and me, we’re different—born into the wrong family. Outsiders in our own home. You’re not all of a sudden going to start acting like the rest of them, are you?”

“You didn’t see what it was like, the way Mom and Lacy took care of her. It wasn’t easy. They’re a lot tougher than you might think.”

“Okay. Good for them. What do you want me to do about it, cry?”

This is too much. Of course, Bobby and I always talked about how we were different from the rest of the family, but he was never mean about it like this. He wasn’t even mad about it. He thought it was funny. Our parents and siblings were just these goofy aliens that didn’t understand us. I always figured he still loved them, though.

“No,” I say, my voice rising. “I don’t want you to cry about it. But I damn sure think you need to come to the funeral. You don’t have to come for Grandma, but you should at least come for Mom. It’ll be real goddamn shitty if you don’t.”

There’s a long pause. I guess he isn’t used to me cursing him.

“Then goddamn shitty is just how it’s going to have to be,” he says finally. “Because I can’t go to a funeral, Ceejay. I just can’t. Maybe everyone will hate me. They probably have a right to, but there’s nothing you can say that’ll make me go. There’s nothing anyone can say.”

“And so that’s it?”

“That’s it.”

I hate to get beat by anything, but I know I’m beat this time. The only thing left to do is think of a lie to tell Mom so Bobby’s absence won’t go down quite so hard.

Here’s the lie—Dani’s little boy, Ian, is sick, and Bobby has to stay home with him while she’s at work. It’s not the best lie in the world, but it has a kid in it, so I figure as soft-hearted as Mom is, she’ll play along. Of course, she does, too. When I tell her, she says she thinks Bobby’s doing the right thing. She even smiles, but not enough to cover up the hurt underneath. Dad looks like he’s ready to explode. He doesn’t, though, not this time.

The day of the funeral it takes several cars to get us all to Grandma’s church in Davenport for the service. The one I’m in is packed and uncomfortable, and I’m wearing a dress for the first time in about a hundred years. When we get there, the parking lot is already pretty full. Our family walks in together after everyone else has been seated, and in a weird way, with
everybody looking at us, I feel like a celebrity. Like one of the stars of death’s latest show.

There must be a million flowers at the front of the sanctuary, where Grandma’s coffin sits closed. At first, I can’t help thinking that seems phony. All these people and all these flowers—surely Grandma wasn’t that beloved. I mean, it’s a sad day and all, but I saw Grandma around other people, and she wasn’t much nicer to them than she was to me and Bobby. But, looking around, I realize most of the people are from Knowles. They’re here for Mom, not Grandma. They want to show her she’s not alone, and I have to admire them for that.