“Because I might be dying,” she said, “and if I am, there won’t be any later when I get a chance to give Atlas these cufflinks. He’s my only great-grandchild—I’m sure that won’t always be true, but he’s probably the only one I’m going to meet—and I want him to have his great-grandfather’s cufflinks, and I can’t give them to him from a coma, and I can’t give them to him from the grave, so I am giving them to you now to give to him later.”
“Can we change the subject?”
“You can,” she said. “But I can’t. When you’re dying, it’s hard to think about anything else. When you’re dying, you have a lot of other things to take care of first. It’s very stressful.”
“You think this is funny?”
“A little bit. Don’t you?”
“I don’t. Not at all.”
“Oh honey, it’s fine. This isn’t a tragedy. If I were thirty, this would be a tragedy. If I were two days from retirement or my pregnant wife were about to give birth to our first child, if I hadn’t lived long enough to know you . . . that would have been tragic. But baby, I’m eighty-seven. I’ve seen my child grown. I’ve seen her child grown. I lived long enough to meet Atlas even. I haven’t been in pain. I haven’t been sick. It’s not looking like I’ll spend a decade and a half in a vegetative state not knowing my name. This isn’t a tragedy, baby; this is just sad. Sometimes things are sad, but that’s nothing we can’t handle. Sometimes, it’s even nice to be sad. It means things have been happy. And that they will be again.”
“I’m not ready to resign myself to this yet,” I said tearfully.
“I know you’re not, honey,” said my grandmother, “but that’s too goddamn bad, isn’t it?”
It didn’t seem entirely appropriate that she (old and sick) should be comforting me (young and well). It seemed like she was the one with the awful thing to come to terms with, like she was the one who needed me to be strong now. But even old and sick, maybe especially old and sick, she remained the adult and I the child. She was the grandmother, and I was curled up next to her, letting her rub my back. She remained the strong, stoic, in-control woman I had always let myself be a little girl with. And I guess, I hope, it was comforting to both of us.
The last night I stayed over, the night before I went back home, began like this: “Don’t tell yourself this is the last night ever or anything. I’m not going to die tomorrow just because you’re going back to school. Let’s not get mushy.” So we sat and watched the ballgame and drank Cokes and pretended that the reason my grandmother, who always wanted me to cook for her, did not want me to cook for her was because she had had a big lunch (when, in fact, I don’t think she’d eaten solid food in days). And in the middle of the fifth inning, my grandmother looked thoughtful for a moment and, not taking her eyes off the TV, asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Is Ethan a baseball fan?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised.
She narrowed her eyes. “Yankees?”
“Mets.”
“Good.” Most people get their love of sports from their fathers. Neither my father nor I particularly like sports at all. But baseball isn’t so much sport as narrative, storytelling, and I get my love of it not from my father but from my grandmother. She and my grandfather were living in Baltimore before they moved to Vancouver when my mom was born, and they were losing too much money at the track betting on horse racing. At some point, they made a conscious decision to become baseball fans instead—first Orioles fans, then Expos fans when they moved to Canada. Into the Expos tradition, I was born. Their poor attendance, their poor play never bothered us. My grandmother and I used to spend one week alone together in Montreal every summer, practicing my French and sitting in the stands at Olympic Stadium with five thousand other fans. My grandmother loved the Expos and the Orioles and the Mariners who she got on the Seattle channel on TV, but most of all, she hated the Yankees. Turns out these things are hereditary.
She seemed pleased to hear that Ethan wasn’t a Yankee fan, but she dropped it. Then during the seventh-inning stretch, she said, “I have something for Ethan too, but he’s not ready for it yet. When he is, you give it to him. But not yet.”
Hard to know where to start. “What is it?” I settled for.
She nodded toward her bureau. “In my top drawer. Grandpa’s watch.”
“You gave that to Dad years ago.”
“That was his good watch. This is something else.”
I went over and retrieved it. We opened the box together. Its face was a silver baseball. Its hands were silver bats. The straps were made of leather and had the curved red lace stitching of a baseball. It was the coolest thing I’d maybe ever seen. On the back was engraved, “With love from your number one fan.” I wanted it.
“It’s not for you remember,” said my grandmother, reading my mind apparently.
“How have I never seen this before?”
“It wasn’t for me either. It’s too big for us,” she said, laying her arm next to mine, comparing our long fingers and nails, our tiny wrists. “I open that box though to look at it almost every day. It brings him back. I see his arm in that watch, his hand, his fingers. That was his everyday watch, not his good one. I see him coming home from work in that watch, eating dinner, playing with your mom. I see him touching me in that watch.”
“Why do you want Ethan to have it?”
“Same reason.”
“Because you see him touching you in it?”
“Because I might not be around later when it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“I think you know,” she said.
“Why don’t you give it to him yourself? He’s much older than Atlas. He won’t put it in his mouth or anything.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason.”
“What’s that?”
“I think you know.”
That night while my grandmother slept, I thought about what she thought I knew. She thought Ethan was in love with me, and we would get married and spend the rest of our lives together and be happy forever, that she would be at the wedding only in spirit and so had to offer this family heirloom now, that he and I would have children together, her great-grandchildren, who would be pseudosiblings to Atlas, the one great-grandchild she would ever meet. At least that’s what she wanted to think. She hadn’t even met Ethan but had only heard about him. I did not think that. I did not think Ethan wanted to marry me. I did not feel sure that I would always have Atlas in my life. I worried that I would never have any children of my own. And at the same time, I thought if I did someday get married, of course my grandmother would be there because what was the point of a wedding without her. I thought if I did someday have children, my grandmother would meet them because almost definitely absolutely certainly she wasn’t dying and would be fine. It was a strange collusion of cloudy, wallowing pessimism and blind, ignorant hope: no one loves me or ever will, but as long as I don’t acknowledge that she’s sick, my grandmother will live forever and ever. Everything will be okay okay okay.