Grandma put her hand on my arm. Our adventure has begun! she said. Isn’t this wonderful ? She said it while she was still doing things on the toilet. She asked me if I’d ever seen this thing on her arm. She held up her left elbow. It’s the size of a large walnut! she said. She was rubbing it. It was more the size of a golf ball. It doesn’t hurt at all, she said. Look, it’s perfectly round! She was really examining it. It’s similar to the thing that Shadow had, remember? The vet said it was completely benign. Feel it! she said. No! I said. Why do you have that! Then I was worried that the airport guy would hear us and bust down the door. None of the confused men in the washroom said anything to us even though they could hear by our voices that we were females in their washroom. I’m growing another arm to hug you with, said Grandma. It’s part of my personal evolution. I heard a man outside our stall say, Awww, that’s adorable. Safe travels, guys! Was he talking to me and Grandma? We could never leave the stall now. We would have to stay until all the current men inside the washroom had left and gone far away from the washroom to their gates and onto their planes. But new ones would come in during that time. How would we escape? I texted Mom: Grandma forced me into a man’s washroom. Mom texted more hearts and happy faces. Then she texted that she was at rehearsal now but we’d talk later. She loved me this much. She sent the wrong emoji which was of a skeleton or maybe she was trying to tell me she loved me to death.
Everything else is a blur in my mind. I tried to distinguish between the voice of the ego and the actual situation. That’s one step in the process of detachment. Mom used to have all the steps written down on a piece of paper taped to her bedroom wall before she tore it down. Somehow Grandma and I got out of the washroom and the men who saw us didn’t care except for one old guy who said, My sisters, my sisters when we walked past him. Grandma told me he said that because for him it wasn’t right to be in a washroom with strange women and so he had to call us his sisters, and that way, in his mind, we would be family to him. Then at security it took eighty hours to get through with Grandma and all that rigamarole which she pronounced like it was Italian pasta with rolling r’s. The security woman discovered farmer sausage in Grandma’s suitcase and told her she’d have to check it. It was for Lou and Ken. It was their favourite food. They had eaten it non-stop when they were kids in the old town of escaped Russians but they couldn’t find it anywhere in Fresno. They’d looked everywhere. The woman told Grandma that sausage couldn’t fly internationally. Grandma didn’t want to go all the way back to check her bag so she handed over the sausage. The woman said, Oh, nice, when she saw Grandma’s nail polish. What is it again, Swiv? asked Grandma. Lady Balls, I said. That’s right, said Grandma. I could tell Grandma was super tired already because she handed over the farmer sausage without a fight and said well, there’s your lunch to the security woman. The woman said she was a vegetarian ever since she’d seen a terrifying documentary about the meat industry but she’d see if her colleague at the other conveyor belt would want it because he ate everything in sight. Grandma said it’s good sausage! She’d had to get her friend Wilda to pick it up for her in Kitchener at a black market, so tell him to enjoy it! Oh, he will! said the woman. He’s such a carnivore! Grandma said a man after my own heart! The woman told Grandma and me to have an awesome time in the raisin capital and to bring home the sunshine. She waved her scanner at us and Grandma saluted her.
I parked Grandma in the wheelchair section of the gate and went to get her a small black coffee and a bran muffin. I felt around in my backpack to make sure all her pills and killers and nitro spray and our passports were still there. I had Mom’s assignment in there too, to mark on the plane. Grandma took her Dead Heat out of her purse to read while I was getting the stuff. When I came back she was sleeping. I sat beside her and took deep breaths. I worried about being cross-eyed. I tried to force my pupils to the outside edges of my eyeballs. Grandma snorted in her sleep. A teenager snapped his head up from his phone like he’d just heard a boa constrictor hissing in his ear. There was an announcement that people needing help could get on the plane now. I didn’t know if that meant us. It felt like it was us. Dead Heat fell from Grandma’s lap onto the floor. Then a lady from the airline came and told me that it meant us. She picked up Grandma’s book and handed it to me. Oh, it’s a short one! she said. I told her it was only one section. I was testing her ethics. She didn’t care. Grandma woke up instantly like she’d been fake sleeping and did the sitting victory dance. Let’s move, Swiv! she said. Load me up! I started piling the suitcases on top of Grandma but the lady from the airline said she would push the wheelchair so my hands would be free to pull the suitcases. Grandma and the lady took off, talking and laughing about being decrepit, and we got on the plane with the other people who needed help. At some point in Grandma’s life someone must have threatened to kill her whole family unless she became friends with every single person she met.