“She’s all right,” Mom says.

For some reason, when she’s sleeping, you see how small Granma is—just a sack of bones, really, apart from her swollen hand. It’s kind of embarrassing; she makes a lot of noise. You can see the hair around her lips move when she breathes.

Mom puts her arm around me. “I’m having a nice Thanksgiving,” she says.

When the movie’s over, Granma wakes up. Nobody’s really hungry and Granma doesn’t want to cook again anyway, but I have a bowl of cereal while I watch SportsCenter on TV. Granma’s already in bed. Mom stands in the kitchen archway and looks at me. “That’s what your father always ate when he came home late from work.”

She dries up the pots and dishes and puts them away, then goes into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When I come in, her light is already off—I get undressed in the dark and slip under the covers. I’ve got a little pocket flashlight that Granma gave me, so I can read at night . . . and I turn that on and read under the scratchy wool blanket. But it’s kind of annoying, holding the book in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and eventually I give up. But I’m still not very sleepy, and after a while, I say, “Mom”—quietly, so she can only hear me if she’s already awake.

“Yes, Ben?” Her voice seems a long way away.

“Is Granma all right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because of her hand.”

“Don’t worry about that, Ben. It’s just the way it is now. I don’t think it hurts her.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but why doesn’t she—I mean she’s got lots of hair on her chin. . . .”

“Oh, she doesn’t care anymore. You get to a point where none of that stuff matters.”

“Couldn’t she just . . . shave?”

“If you shave them off, they just come back worse.” Nobody says anything for a while, and I think that might be the end of the conversation. But then my mom’s voice comes out of the dark. “Are you worried about her, Ben? She’s in pretty good shape. At her age, you just get tired sometimes. At my age, too,” she says, and laughs. “Good night, Ben.”

After that, I lie there and listen until I can hear her breathing. The curtains are closed, but somebody left the porch light on, and I can see a crack of light falling on the bedroom floor. For some reason, I start talking to my dad in my head—I just tell him everything that happened today, how I helped out in the kitchen, and Mom got mad at me about the football game and almost cried. Then Granma fell asleep watching the movie. There are a lot of leftovers, I tell him. We didn’t have enough people to eat it all.

Thirteen

A WEEK AFTER THANKSGIVING, Mom says to Granma and me, “Well, at least one of us has made a new friend. I thought I might invite somebody for dinner tomorrow night.”