The nights cold. Sleeping on piled clothes on the hardwood floor and dressed in sweatpants and three sweatshirts with a single quilt draped over me. I always woke shivering. Sometimes I could fall back to sleep, sometimes I couldn’t. Always stiff and aching. Always hungry and scared. Scared of what, I wasn’t sure. But scared all the same.

6

A year and a half later my grandmother had her third and final stroke. She sat on the living room couch reading to me while I sat at her feet. We were alone, and when I first saw the crooked look on her face, I laughed, thinking it was a bit of histrionics for added effect to the story she read. But I knew something was wrong when the book fell from her lap and she tried to speak but only mumbled. I took her by the hand, tried shaking her out of her stupor. She looked down at me with blank eyes. I dialed 911 as I had been taught. I told them something was the matter with my grandma, then in my fear I hung up the phone.

The White Elephant Saloon, the nearby bar my parents frequented most days, was number two on the speed dial, and my mother had showed me several times how to dial it in case something happened.

Loud music blared in the background and in my shaky voice, I asked, “Is my mom there?”

“Your mom?” the voice asked, pausing to look around the bar. “Do you mean Darla?”

I said yes, bawling, terrified. When my mother answered she was laughing at whatever had been said to get her to the phone.

“Hello?”

“Something . . . has happened . . . to Grandma,” I muttered through sobs.

“What? What has happened?” she asked. Her laughter drained away into hysteria.

I was shaking my head, unable to do anything but cry.

“I’m on my way, baby.”

She burst through the door with my father not two minutes later. My grandmother had since closed her eyes and was slumped forward. I was holding her hand, again cross-legged at her feet. My mother swept into the room and took her in her arms.

“Not now,” she repeated through tears of her own. “God, not now, not yet.”

My father called 911 though a siren already wailed in the distance. I walked across the living room and sat on the opposite couch, watching my mother rock my grandmother in her arms, telling her to hold on and that help was on the way. My father lifted me into his arms and carried me into their bedroom.

“Shh,” he said. I wrapped tightly around him. “You did good, buddy. Everything’s going to be okay.”