It was a week of bitter cold, dirty snow frozen all across the state, but our hours together had the dazed, loose-limbed quality of fever. Grandma Lucy was getting worse. She barely ate. I felt that I could see her body getting smaller across the span of hours. Still, I braved winter to fill the fridge with her favorites: green grapes, whole buttermilk, rice pudding, and seven-ounce bottles of beer that looked as if they’d been designed for the hands of children. She wouldn’t eat much besides the pudding. The grapes were too tart, she said, and the milk too thick, like wet cloth draped across the inside of her throat. “I can’t breathe when I drink it,” she said. “It chokes me up.”

Memories came without warning or context. “She slapped me once,” she said. “Did you know that?”

I shook my head. I could tell from her voice, its somber hush, that she was talking about Matilda.

“I think maybe she could have killed me,” she said. “If she’d been drunk enough.”

“She had a drinking problem?”

Grandma Lucy paused, then shook her head, confused, as if she’d forgotten what I’d asked. “She was so beautiful,” she said. “When she was young.”

I found poems that might lend my life a sense of gravity. I read them in the near-dark, trying to pass the time so I wouldn’t go to bed at such embarrassingly early hours. When you are old and grey and full of sleep…My throat was gritty with wine; anger rose like phlegm. How could anyone write those words once they’d seen aging for themselves? But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,/And loved the sorrows of your changing face. What did young Yeats know about the bodies of old women, how their pubic hair turned ashen between the sticks of their thighs?

I couldn’t look at my own vagina without imagining the labia wilting like a flower. I hadn’t masturbated properly in weeks, and not for lack of trying. I roused dirty old fantasies from my adolescence—rich men paying me for sex, stroking their fat fingers along my spine—but I couldn’t make them work anymore. My body felt pitted, flesh lingering hopelessly around a gutted core: the place orgasms had come from, before the sight of Lucy’s body made them sputter dry.

*   *   *

I was a little drunk when my mother arrived. Grandma Lucy was asleep. I hadn’t meant to be drunk, but she was two hours late and I’d started to think she wasn’t coming. I opened the door and she hugged me, a quick pressure like a heartbeat. Her hands felt like paws of ice. “Jesus,” she said. “You smell like wine.”

“We had a little with dinner.” My head was still thick with a dark sweet fog. I’d been napping.

“Mother’s been drinking, too?”

“Just beer,” I said. “Like always.”

“She shouldn’t be drinking anything.” She rubbed her hands together. They were ungloved and bluish-pale.