When I landed, my grandparents were waiting at the gate for me like usual, but Grandpa had more gray hair than before, and he didn’t pick me up when he hugged me. We were halfway to the car before I noticed it was Grandma carrying my suitcase. Then Grandpa got in the passenger seat instead of behind the wheel, and Grandma explained in her sunniest voice that Grandpa needed to take things easier than he used to but was otherwise perfectly fine.

Because of his heart Grandpa didn’t smoke a pipe anymore, but even worse, Grandma’s cooking wasn’t as good. When Grandpa complained about his meal tasting bland, Grandma told him that was “salt talk” and that he needed to train his taste buds to appreciate the natural flavors of food. One heart attack was quite enough, she said in a voice I’d never heard her use with him but which got him eating his steamed fish as effectively as it stopped me from sneaking extra cookies from the jar beside the kitchen pantry.

Each night I said one good thing about Prospect Friends at dinner. While Grandma washed up, I went off with Grandpa, who was as crazy for knock-knock jokes and model planes as ever. I put the final phase of my master plan into action four days before my plane trip home. I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting when I popped the question over dessert, but total silence wasn’t it. Finally Grandpa asked, in a voice that made Grandma look up from her apple crumble, if my mother had put me up to this, but when I explained that she didn’t know, that asking them to pay for school had been my idea, he seemed to calm down.

My face turned bright red when he asked how much the school cost. I wasn’t actually sure. In my fantasy version, I asked, they agreed, and that was that, because when you’re rich, price is no object. But in the real version, I asked and then noticed the worn linoleum of the kitchen floor and the towel that Grandma kept beneath the refrigerator to catch the drips. After a quiet that made me want to crawl under the table, Grandpa said how glad he was that I’d asked about school because it meant I knew they’d do anything for me they could. He supposed it must be confusing, coming from a place like Brooklyn, where people didn’t have houses and cars, to a place like Cleveland, where they did. He’d worked steady all his life, which had left him and Grandma plenty comfortable and certainly better off than some, but they weren’t like the folks in Shaker Heights with their private schools and country clubs and fancy vacations. Why, he wouldn’t be surprised if the Shaker Heights folks flew on airplanes a few times a year! As for him and Grandma, they’d never flown themselves, but it was a treat for them to send me that plane ticket every year so that I could. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. My memory would probably be clearer if he’d been angry. Instead he was kind and a little wistful, and the sound of all that understanding fogged my brain. If I’m being honest, which is something I try to do now, the embarrassment of learning that my plane ticket was their yearly luxury wasn’t the worst thing. In the universe that revolved around my twelve-year-old self, the worst thing was my realization that I’d be attending JHS 23 after all.