Chapter 5: Grandma

Grandma lived eleven stops away on the number twelve bus, in the same brick house she had lived in for fifty years.

I rode there with my jacket zipped over my birth certificate and my dead phone in my fist.

The bus smelled like wet umbrellas.

I watched my town go by in the window, and I did not feel brave.

I felt like a person who had jumped off a roof and was still falling.

Grandma opened the door before I knocked.

She was seventy-eight, five feet tall, with white hair she cut herself and a cane she mostly used to point at people.

"There you are," she said. "I knew he was lying."

"Who?"

"Your father. He called this morning and told me you had the flu."

"You've never had the flu in your life."

Then she looked at my face and her voice changed.

"Come in, Chloe."

She sat me at her kitchen table, which was covered in a yellow plastic cloth, and put a cup of tea in front of me.

I had not realized how cold my hands were until I held it.

Grandma lowered herself into the chair across from me.

She took her time.

Then she slid an envelope across the table.

It was small and square, the pale blue kind that cards come in.

On the front she had written CHLOE in her shaky, upright hand.

"Happy birthday," she said. "I would have mailed it, but I wanted to see your face."

I opened it.

The card had a drawing of a spotted dog on the front, and inside was a twenty-dollar bill.

"Same as every year," Grandma said, a bit puzzled.

"Did you like the sweaters I sent too? Your mother said you wore them to pieces."

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