“No way with that stomach. I got this.” Devi grabbed the paper towels and mopped at the paint. Luckily, Mormor had prepped the room with a plastic drop cloth before work, so the disaster hadn’t impacted the Berber carpet.

“You’re the best,” I said. “Both of you.”

Devi flashed me a smile. It made her Pennywise mask crack.

“Except when you do that,” I added. “That’s terrifying.”

“So’s your face.”

Considering I was as bemasked as Devi, she wasn’t wrong.

“Girls.” Mormor shook her head and dumped her soiled paper towels in the garbage. She eyed the walls, assessing her work with a thoughtful nod. “How about you wash your faces, I change out of these overalls and we go to Ikea? I think it’s time to pick out some baby furniture.”

Going to Ikea for not-Swedish people is a harrowing experience. It’s big, it’s crowded. The overhead lighting is brutal and gets you sweaty fast. They’ve set up the aisles so you’re essentially stuck in a mouse maze and the only way out is to pass their Idaho-sized home goods section full of baskets, art and candle tchotchkes you can impulse buy for a buck.

Going to Ikea with your Swedish grandmother? An altogether different, and somehow more aggravating, experience. Not only did you have all that other stuff to contend with, but you had Mormor’s strange Swedish pride, too. At everything. The vast and varied, yet somehow stylistically the same, furnishings became indicators of superior Swedish design, instilled in us by our Viking ancestors. Kitchen cabinets with choose-your-own hardware were a sign of our cleverness. Vikings did, after all, invent the comb, the tent and the magnetic compass, Mormor informed us.

Bet you didn’t know Vikings had skills beyond just raiding and pillaging.

They were big on spatial efficiency and modular home living, too.

Devi and I slogged along behind her, carrying the obnoxious yellow bags with the blue handles while Mormor chattered on and on through the aisles, pushing her cart and smiling. I wasn’t going to rain on her parade—she’d painted me a nursery, after all—but there were times when I considered perhaps diving into a Kvikne wardrobe with two sliding doors and lots of interior storage space in hopes of meeting a goat-man in Narnia.

“Do you even have any Ikea furniture in your house?” Devi whispered to me.

“Nope. She like antiques and Americana,” I whispered back.

“So why’s she so...you know. About Ikea?”

“Because she’s Mormor,” was the best I had.