“Across the hall?”
“The dingbat wing,” Gladys said. “The ones who need help taking a dump. But I’m too smart for ’em.”
“How’s that?”
“Check the fridge.”
Pandora did. Mustard, milk, a loaf of bread, and stacked plastic tubs of processed meat.
“I don’t get near that damn stove,” her grandmother said, meaning the toaster oven. “That’s asking for trouble. But if sandwiches were good enough for that Earl fellow, they’re good enough for me.”
“That’s some good thinking, Gram,” Pandora said, refusing to check the nutrition labels to see how much sodium and preservatives her grandmother’s cold-cut-centric diet entailed.
“You want me to make you something?”
Pandora closed the refrigerator door. “I got a better idea,” she announced, prepared to be argued with, but still giving it a try. “How about we blow this pop stand and have somebody serve us for a change?”
“You mean a restaurant?”
Pandora nodded and then braced for the excuses involving the 101 dietary issues that made dining out impossible—the same ones that had broken her grandfather’s heart before shutting it down altogether. Instead, when she looked up, Gladys already had one boot on and was stepping into the other.
“I’ll drive,” she said.
“Like hell you will,” Pandora said. “You lost your license, remember?”
“That was some bullshit,” Gladys muttered. “That’s what that was.”
“Grandma,” Pandora said, trying for a scold in her voice, but laughing in spite of herself.
Turning into the parking lot for Nanook’s Family Diner, Pandora pulled her father’s F-150 up to one of the icicle-framed windows, set the parking brake, and then went around to the passenger side to hold her grandmother’s gloved hand as she stepped down. Thus far, their adventure in free-range elder care had been uneventful, but that was about to change.
“Stop!” her grandmother shouted within seconds of stepping through the door. “I can’t see,” followed by a surprisingly strong arm shooting out and grabbing the sleeve of her escort’s parka.
Pandora froze on the spot. She’d grown unaccustomed to the ways of the elderly since her grandfather passed away, recalling little more than this: their bones were brittle. They could break a hip at the drop of a hat. Did the same fragility apply to their eyes? Could they be struck blind by stepping the wrong way? Her grandmother’s glasses were already pretty thick, so . . .
Pandora could feel the panic rising toward her face as she imagined the ordeal of navigating her now-blind grandmother back to . . . where? Did they allow blind people back into the assisted-living side? Or did the sudden onset of permanent night herald her grandmother’s exile to extended care? But as she turned to ask the rules, it became clear that Gladys’s glasses weren’t. The culprit wasn’t fog, but ice, caked thick around the lenses. It was thirty below outside, seventy-five and humid inside, thanks to the breakfast buffet’s steam tables. Of course her glasses had iced up.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Pandora said, unhooking the spectacles from around her grandmother’s ears before turning and turning again, looking for someplace to thaw them. A waitress, sight-challenged herself, tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the baseboard heater running along the outside wall, next to a coatrack where parkas hung and underneath which boots puddled.
“Thanks.”
“No prob.”
Her grandmother blinked, her old blue eyes seeming suddenly smaller without the Coke-bottle lenses in front of them. The effect changed her whole face, making it seem naked, defenseless, and far from the manipulative, stink-eye-inflicting hypochondriac Roger had made his widowed mother out to be.
“Hot,” Gladys blurted after Pandora tried returning the newly thawed lenses to their former resting place. The teen flinched, pulling back, a stem in each hand.
They hadn’t even had breakfast yet. They’d not gotten a table, much less looked at a menu, and already she’d succeeded in blinding, then scalding her father’s mother, making her wonder if maybe this punishment was a twofer, intended to teach a lesson not only to Pandora but to the estranged Gladys as well.
They got a booth next to the window they were parked outside of, so Pandora could make sure that the cord from the underhood heater stayed plugged in to the complementary kiosk. It was not unheard of for roaming bands of Alaskan youth to run through parking lots, unplugging vehicles so they could watch their owners cursing over frozen engine blocks. Pandora had overheard her locker neighbors on the curling team bragging about such adventures back before fate pranked one of them harder than anything she could have come up with.
Gladys cleared her throat of a prodigious amount of old-lady phlegm, making her granddaughter turn away from her ad hoc stakeout.
“Sorry, Gram,” Pandora said, hooking a thumb at the window. “Kids.”
Gladys nodded, her ropey-veined hands crossed at the fingertips and sporting fresh nail polish, granddaughter-applied at the old lady’s insistence that she’d not be caught dead out in the real world without a little “gussying up” first. Pandora caught her trying not to be obvious about looking around to see if anyone noticed her nails, shining bloody red, despite the seasonal gloom. She looked down at her menu, to give her grandmother’s vanity a little privacy, but when she looked up again, the old woman’s eyes were focused right on her. They seemed to sparkle just short of tearing up, not from sadness but joy. Over what? Pandora wondered.
But then it hit her like a ton of proverbial bricks. Me, she thought. She’s overjoyed to see me. By which time, the tipping point had been reached, and the old lady’s eyes spilled over, two grudging tears running down the crags and valleys of her well-worn face, forcing her to lift her glasses to dab at the ducts with the edge of her napkin, leaving a single white flake of it behind.
Pandora gestured, trying to indicate that Gladys had something on her face.
“What is it?” Gladys asked as Pandora reached over and removed the offending speck. She presented it, stuck to the tip of her finger.
“I get emotional sometimes,” Gladys admitted. “An old lady’s prerogative, I’ve been told. But also”—she knocked on her forehead with a gnarled hand—“a sign of more senior moments in this old girl’s future.”
“How bad is it?” Pandora asked.
“I haven’t forgotten how to poop on my own,” her grandmother said. “Yet,” she added.
Pandora’s eyes stared; her face, meanwhile, reprised the role that had turned her into a meme. “Jesus, Gram,” she said, letting her head sink, along with her curtaining hair.
“Change of subject,” Gladys announced, pressing her spread hands firmly down on the table between them.
“Okay?”
“Why do you hide your pretty face?” her grandmother asked, raising a hand to brush Pandora’s hair out of the way so she could get a better look.
“Gram, if this face is pretty anything, it’s pretty embarrassing.”
Gladys frowned. “That’s our face you’re talking about, dear.”
Ah, the dreaded “dear.” Pandora had crossed a line, tried backpedaling. “It’s—I’d like a little privacy when it comes to what I’m feeling,” she tried.