“Why?”
“She said because you’re old.”
“I’m sixty-one!”
“That’s what I told her.”
Despite everything, despite the tubes and the pain and the ice spreading through my stomach, I almost laughed. That was my boy. Nine years old and defending my honor from a hospital chair.
But his face didn’t match my smile.
“She said your eyes were bad, too,” he went on quietly. “And that the accident proved you couldn’t take care of me. She said it every time. Like she wanted me to remember it.”
And I thought about what that must have been like for him.
Eleven days. Eleven days of watching his grandmother lie motionless in a bed, not knowing if she’d ever open her eyes. Eleven days of being the only one in the room who loved her. And every few days, the one adult who was supposed to comfort him walked in and told him,
