She sat on the floor behind me, took the scissors out of my hands, and brushed out my hair with her fingers. After a moment’s pause, she started to add small snips around my grand gestures. Eventually, she nudged me to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs.

I got used to Lauren’s hands moving my head around. I closed my eyes and almost fell asleep.

Do-over

Do-over

As my mom recounted it, my dad didn’t expect to get nearly everything when his mother died. I surmise that his brothers didn’t take it very well, but there was nothing for them to do — the old house and the majority of the money and investments went to him, the rest of her savings and a few mementos were parceled off to them.

The last time I had been at that house was Christmas before I moved east. When I was a teenager, the house had seemed unfathomably and forbiddingly grand, like something out of a nineteenth-century novel, but by then I dreaded going there. At dinner everyone would listen to my dad’s bombastic, self-aggrandizing monologue about his business, while my hick uncles — general contractors or store managers or IT guys in Saline and Milan and Pinckney — would all wait and listen until they could interject with corollaries. Their shrewish, bottle-blonde wives and my sullen cousins stayed silent. My dad was the one who was being enterprising, taking some risks, so his words were worth the most of anyone there.

My grandmother sat at the head of the table and didn’t speak either — her silence was imperial, not cowed; she’d watch us watching Dad, sipping from a narrow glass of port, almost seeming to look past our present selves and seeing the children we all once were. She was quietly satisfied to have all her progeny and their wives there, even if none of them had especially amounted to much, but she was also scrutinizing us, withholding judgment until the end.

That last Christmas, my grandmother cornered me after dinner. The men and childless women were milling around in the grand front parlor, drinking and pacing and talking. She was already beginning to lose her lucidity by that point.

“Kieran,” she said. “I hope your father is doing all right.”

“He is, I think,” I said.

“With all this with his work,” she said, leaning in close to me, moving her hands, “I just hope he doesn’t lose sight of himself.”

She was talking so quietly I had to bend down to listen to her. She wore an imploring look I often saw on her face in her old age. “Sure,” I said.

“I just,” she said, then paused and grimaced before starting again. “I just don’t want him to go the way of your uncle James.”

I nodded solemnly.