It was the first Wednesday night after school let out for the summer. I had just switched on the television and was searching with the remote —reality, reality, news, rerun, reality — when the phone rang, and my mother answered it. “Wait, say that again?” I said. She pulled the phone away from her face and cupped her hand over it. “She died this afternoon. Your father wants you to come down for a few days. You can get a standby flight in the morning.” I hit the mute button on the remote. “Grandma?” “He wants you there. There’s a lot to do.” I kept watching the screen, but my eyes began to unfocus. My grandmother. A hospital had called two weeks ago to say she had been brought in with a stroke and was in a coma, so Dad took the next plane down from Boston and had been there ever since. I’d never met Grandma. We never saw her as a family, and she didn’t travel. Even my father said that when he was young she wasn’t around very much, and he was sometimes brought up by other people, which made her seem odd to me.
