Reagan finished swallowing. “She really should have.”
He set the roll on his plate. “I kept telling her . . . that if she wanted me to get into heaven, she’d have to deliver me herself.”
Reagan laughed. There were tears in her eyes. “That woman had no follow-through.”
Her grandpa looked up at her. His eyes were shining, too. “Exactly.”
“Do you think Grandma would have been as careful as you? Through all this?”
“Heck no, I would have had to nail our windows closed.”
Reagan’s grandmother had been a short, wide woman who dyed her hair red and always wore pink lipstick. She was active in her church, active in the community. The type of person who went to all of her grandkids’ recitals and school plays, even after she had twenty of them.
She framed every school photo the grandkids ever gave her, always leaving the old ones inside so that the pictures stacked up and made the backs hard to close. Reagan’s senior picture was sitting on a coffee table in the living room, and if you opened it up, her whole childhood would spring out.
“I can’t even imagine your grandmother wearing a mask,” Grandpa said.
“Maybe she’d get into it,” Reagan said. “It would have given her something to do with her old quilting scraps.”
“Those homemade masks aren’t good for anything . . .”
“Better than nothing,” she said.
“I’ve got some N95s for when I work with insulation. Remind me to give you a couple when you leave.”
“All right.” The potatoes were sticky, but the gravy was good. Reagan’s whole plate was brown and white. The only green thing was her dish of Jell-O—she should have brought a vegetable. “My mom hates wearing a mask because she says they smear her lipstick. So then I say, ‘Don’t wear lipstick,’ and she acts like I said, ‘Don’t wear pants.’”
Her grandpa laughed. But it turned sharp at the end. “I wish she’d be more careful.”
“Me, too,” Reagan said.
“To be honest, sometimes I’m glad your grandma didn’t have to live through this. I think about it sometimes, that she never heard about it. She never worried about it. She never lost anyone to it. She left before she ever had to take on this burden. And I’m glad for that.”
Reagan nodded.
She couldn’t really think of anything to say after that. And her grandpa didn’t seem to want to talk more, either. And there was no one to make them be sociable.
Reagan had quit smoking a long time ago. After college. Smoking used to make her feel like such a badass. But then she got out of school and started working—and smoking just made her feel hard. Even the way she held the cigarette in her hand and in her mouth . . . It was like she was always smirking. Always making a face like, “Well, isn’t that fucking perfect.”
Reagan already felt hard enough. She didn’t need any accessories. She didn’t need to telegraph it out to the world.
Also she kept getting bronchitis. It was a fucking drag, so she quit.
But she still missed cigarettes. She missed having the excuse of them. The “Be right back”s. She missed the way decent people would leave you alone as soon as you pulled out the pack.
She still took cigarette breaks sometimes.
After dinner, she and her grandpa moved into the living room to watch television. Reagan didn’t want to watch Fox News, so they settled on the Weather Channel. He sat in his easy chair, and Reagan sat on the couch, fiddling with a crochet hook she’d found tucked between the cushions.
After a half hour, she said, “I’m going to get some air.”
Her grandpa nodded.
She put on her coat and headed out onto the back deck. It was too cold for the snow to melt, but it wasn’t freezing—or it was just barely freezing.
“Hey,” someone said.
Reagan jumped.
It was Mason again, standing on his parents’ deck. “I swear to God,” he said. “I’m not trying to startle you.”
“Jesus Christ, Mason.”
“Sorry.”
Reagan frowned at him. “What are you even doing out here?”
“Getting some air. Do you want me to put on a mask?”
She looked between them. They were at least twenty feet apart. And they were outdoors. “Yeah,” she said. “If you’re gonna keep talking to me.”
Mason fished a mask out of his pocket.
Reagan did the same thing. She wasn’t sure why she was bothering; she should just go back inside. “What are you out here avoiding?” she asked, sliding the elastic behind her ears.