A phone call woke me up before dawn. It was four in the morning, and Grandma Lucy had fallen. “I’m alright,” she said. “But I’ve been lying here for hours.”

She’d needed to use the bathroom, she explained, and had forgotten the night-light. It was dark, was the problem, and she’d tripped on a stool.

“Where are you now?” I said. I was already late for work. Ms. Z was having an interview—filmed by someone for something—at an Upper East Side Starbucks.

“I’m near the stove,” Grandma Lucy said. “I’m near the bottom of the stove, but I can also see the living room.”

“The kitchen isn’t on the way to the bathroom,” I said. “You said you were going to the bathroom.”

I never made it to Starbucks. I got a slew of messages from Ms. Z, as I’d known I would. Everything had gone wrong, and there would be hell to pay, and did I know that? Did I really understand that? I’d better. I’d be made to understand, I was assured. At a certain point she asked her housekeeper to keep leaving messages on my machine, once an hour, but the housekeeper’s voice sounded defeated and a little jealous: I’d gotten out. She was still there.

Lucy wasn’t unconscious, just unable to get up again. She was frail as a bird but hard to lift. If any part of her dragged across the floor, her thin skin tore and bled. “Be careful,” she said. “Be careful with me, okay?”

I called my mother. “Things aren’t good out here,” I told her. “I think you should come as soon as you can.”

She said she was finishing a case, and would I believe her—please, because it was true—that this case was a matter of life and death? She booked a plane ticket for the next week. I decided that Grandma Lucy would not spend another night alone. I’d stay on her purple couch until my mother came.

I told Ms. Z that my grandmother had died because this was the only way I could imagine getting the week off. I packed a duffel bag and bought, for once, a one-way ticket on the train. “You don’t have to stay over,” Grandma Lucy said. “I’m doing fine.”

But she seemed pleased when I arrived. She’d made the couch as best she could, sheets tucked messily under cushions. I pictured her hands, quivering, trying to get it right. At night I watched ants crawl in a thin line from the cupboards, quiet and constant as leaking fluid. I drank cheap red wine. It helped the long hours edge away into sleep. One day a black crow dropped the corpse of a mouse onto the frost-slicked windowsill, and I swept it off with a broom, watched it drop three stories to the street below.