So when she called on the morning of Sophie’s first birthday and said, “I’m coming,” I genuinely thought I’d misheard her.
I was standing in my kitchen with a roll of pink streamers wedged under one arm and frosting drying on my thumb. Sophie was in her high chair, whacking a plastic spoon against the tray like she was keeping time for a song only she could hear.
“Grandma, you can barely sit up,” I said.
“I said I’m coming.”
Her voice was thin, but the tone underneath it was the one that had outlasted two husbands, four doctors, and every nurse who had ever tried to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
“Grandma, the party’s here. At our house.”
“I know where you live, Elena.”
I closed my eyes. There was no point arguing once she used that tone. My mother had lost that argument her whole life. So had every doctor who’d ever met her.
“How are you even planning to get here?” I asked.
“You worry too much.”
“You’re a hundred and one.”
“And somehow I still know that.”
I almost laughed. Then I heard her cough — deep, and wet, and long enough that my irritation curdled into something closer to fear.
“Grandma.”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t. We both knew it. But I also knew better than to say so out loud and watch her pretend I hadn’t.
“Does Mom know you’re doing this?”
“Not yet.”
“Of course she doesn’t.”
“I called you first.”
That detail stayed with me long after we hung up. Grandma never explained herself. She certainly never spent energy reassuring anyone. But something about the order of that phone call — me before my own mother — sat in my chest like a stone I couldn’t quite identify.
She wasn’t just attending a birthday party.
She had decided she needed to be there. And whatever her reason was, it had been enough to pull a woman who hadn’t stood up in two years back out into the world.
I just didn’t know why yet.
Three hours later, a medical transport van turned into my driveway, and I stood at the front window unable to make my legs carry me to the door.
PART 2
Bryce came up behind me and looked over my shoulder at the van idling in the driveway.
“No way,” he said.
“I told you she was serious.”
“You said she called. I thought she’d change her mind by lunch.”
“Grandma doesn’t change her mind. Other people eventually surrender.”
“That explains you,” he said, and I elbowed him in the ribs, smiling despite myself.
Then the van’s back doors swung open, and my smile disappeared.
