After dinner, I offer to help clear the table. “You’ve had a long day,” Granma says. “You can start helping out around here tomorrow. Or never, so far as I’m concerned.”

So I go back to the couch and sit and watch TV, which is great, because it means I don’t have to talk. There’s a baseball game on, but I don’t really care what it is. I just zone out. The next thing I know the TV is off and Mom is sitting next to me on the couch. She’s got her hand on my forehead, like she’s trying to see if I have a temperature, and the truth is, I feel pretty weird—like, wide-awake and tired at the same time, and just kind of not there. “Come on, Ben. Beddy-bye.” She hasn’t said that to me in a while.

It feels weird going to bed with Mom in the room. When I was little I used to climb under the covers with her and Dad on Sunday mornings, which is something they argued about, because Dad didn’t want it to become a habit . . . but that was years ago anyway.

When Mom goes to the bathroom, I quickly put on my pajamas. She comes back wearing her nightgown, which is faded yellow and has flowers like blue daisies all over it. “It’s all yours,” she says.

The bathroom has little green tiles, a lot of which are cracked or missing. It smells of lemon air freshener. The mirror is old-fashioned, with patterns cut into it, and the medicine shelf is full of prescription bottles—Granma’s medicines. I brush my teeth and wash my face, which wakes me up. Mom is already in bed when I come back in.

“Do you want to read for a bit?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Are you going to say okay to everything?”

“Just for the next few years.” I smile.

“Well, at least we can laugh,” she says, and turns on her bedside lamp.

My lamp casts a little circle of light on my covers, and it makes the rest of the room seem almost black. There’s a bright ring around the edge of what I can see. Mom is outside the edge.

“Which is the bed you used to sleep in? I mean, when you were a kid,” I ask. I don’t want her to fall asleep just yet—I don’t want to be left alone.

“This one. The bed I’m in.”

“So what was my bed for?”

“Sleepovers,” she says.

“Does it feel weird, sleeping in your old bed?”

“I’ve slept in it before,” Mom says.

“But I mean, with me here.”

She doesn’t answer for a bit, and I think she’s fallen asleep. Then she says, “When I was a kid, I really wanted a sister. It annoyed me that Mom and Dad got to sleep together but I was on my own. Like I was the odd one out. It’s nice that you’re here now—I don’t have to be lonely anymore.” Then she says, “No more talking. I’m tired.”