My bed has little dark wood posts on all the corners, and Granma has laid a quilt over the sheet, which is stitched together from lots of rags or pieces of old clothes. Mom sees me looking at it. “You probably won’t need it—it stays pretty hot at night.” There’s a fan on the ceiling, which makes a creaking noise. It has a lamp in the middle, which you turn on with a metal chain, and the chain keeps swinging around in the breeze. I put my backpack on the bed and Granma comes in.

“I bet you both could use something to drink.”

Mom says, “The first thing I need is the bathroom.”

“Who said I’m talking to you?” Granma smiles and turns to me. “What do you want? I’ve got iced tea, I’ve got Dr Pepper.”

I look at my mom. “Go ahead,” she says.

“Dr Pepper, please.”

“There’s no need to stand on ceremony,” Granma tells me as she leaves for the kitchen.

Mom is on her way to the bathroom. “There’s nothing wrong with saying please,” she calls out.

Then I’m alone.

For a minute I just sit there on the bed, which makes little noises when I move; you can feel the springs in the mattress. The bedroom window overlooks the backyard. But there’s a porch or something outside, and the roof goes over it, so that the sun doesn’t shine into the room directly. It’s shady and not cool exactly, but the shade is kind of . . . thick somehow, warm but not hot, the fan is creaking overhead, I’m sitting on this old bedspread in this strange house, and the grass in the yard is so bright in the sunshine that it almost hurts my eyes.

In New York that morning, when we left the house, it was cool enough that I shivered when the fountain in the courtyard caught the breeze. But when you’re tired, you feel cold. I’m still tired, but at least I’m the opposite of cold. Eventually I get up and follow Granma down the hall and into the kitchen. She says, “I was just going to bring it to you,” and takes a bottle of Dr Pepper out of the fridge. “Do you want a glass?” she asks.

“I’m all right.” But she takes out a glass anyway and fills it with crushed ice.

With Mom in the bathroom, it’s just the two of us. She has a really old face, so it’s kind of hard to tell what she used to look like, because it’s so wrinkled. But she moves pretty well, and apart from her swollen hand, she looks all right. A few years ago she had cancer. I don’t really remember it, except that Mom went away for a while, and Dad’s sister, Aunt Becky, came to live with us in New York—just to take me to school and pick me up, things like that. Granma had an operation and then chemotherapy, but when I saw her again at Christmas, she looked okay, just like, a lot older, and her hair looked thin, and her hand was swollen. The hair grew back, but her hand still looks funny. Mom said it had something to do with the lymph nodes, something wasn’t draining properly. . . . I don’t like to think about it, but suddenly I feel bad about saying what I did to Jake.