I told her I handled the utilities because Grandpa hated online banking, although he still insisted on balancing the checkbook himself.
“Do you like living here?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And if you wanted to live somewhere else?”
I laughed a little.
“Grandpa would pack the car before I finished telling him.”
Marianne smiled, but there was something careful about it.
Before leaving, she glanced at the stairs.
“Who sleeps upstairs?”
“I do.
Grandpa’s downstairs now.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
She wrote something in a notebook.
That evening, I asked Grandpa whether we were in trouble.
He reached for my hand.
“No, Birdie.
But somebody may be confusing your grief with an opportunity.”
I thought he meant bills.
Or the house.
I didn’t imagine he meant me.
Two days before he died, Grandpa asked me to close the hospital-room door.
Rain tapped the window.
A machine beside his bed kept making a sound I would hear in dreams long afterward.
