Grammy had her eyes partly open, dozing, a cigarette wasting away between her fingers, like Mom. I turned my attention to the news, holding the wooden creamsicle stick and the wrapper in my hand. Peter Jennings was gearing up to a segment about NASA and Pioneer 10, how it sent its last signal, and how NASA had no plans to contact Pioneer 10. No plans! None. The metal ship was going to keep on going way out there in quiet, quiet glides of black, and since it was a thing, a machine, it couldn’t see like us, and we way back here would never, ever know if the machine was okay. I wished that the near impossible would happen: that a passing space rock would collide with it, shatter it to pieces, and send it broken toward the stars.

The news ended, and while the TV went black I wondered when Grammy would send her last message. In her recliner, barely rocking, she snored, her cigarette ash long, bending, slipping from her fingers. I saw to it, plucked the cigarette from Grammy’s fingers, and when the ash fell to the carpet I rubbed it in with my foot. I didn’t set Grammy’s smoke in the ashtray, but instead I held it, looking at the filter and the red coal dimly lit, and I thought how I could take some if I wanted to, could commit to it. I put it to my lips.

Grammy was looking at me.

“It was gonna fall,” I said. I put out the cigarette in the ashtray.

“Woliwoni,” she said.

Grammy resituated herself in her recliner. Then she looked at the creamsicle wrapper and its dried wooden stick. “Go on,” she told me. “Have another.”

. . .

I walked out the front door and she closed it behind me and I heard the click of the dead bolt. The night sky was so packed with stars that I felt the urge to squint. My stomach was grumbling from the four creamsicles I’d eaten, and from the cigarettes, too. A day with Grammy, I thought. Smokes and sweets.

At home, all Mom’s jewelry was spread out on the kitchen table. Mom and Frick were in the living room, watching TV, three empty Barefoot bottles of wine on the coffee table. As I stood there in the living room, waiting for Mom to say something, Frick spoke for her.

“You were at your grandmother’s?” he said.

Yes, I told him.

The house was scrubbed clean and smelled like bleach, the way it did when Mom was upset and had scrubbed the floors like she was trying to erase them.

I brushed my teeth, and my tongue was bright orange, and no amount of scraping with the toothbrush removed it.

“Good night,” I said from the hallway.

“Good night,” Frick said.

“Good night, mumma,” I said.