A muscle tensed in my mother’s jaw. I was the eldest of her three girls. Beth was thirty-one and had just had her second baby. But Lindsey was twenty-nine and showed no signs of settling down anytime soon. And a nearly thirty-year-old unmarried daughter paired with a soon-to-be-divorced nearly thirty-five-year-old daughter put her at a distinct disadvantage in the lifelong competition between the two sisters.
“But,” Grandma continued, cutting into the chicken piccata on her plate. “I didn’t come here to talk about Lily tonight.” She speared a small piece with her fork. “I came to say goodbye.”
I felt my blood turn to ice. Cancer. It had to be cancer. She didn’t look sick. But she always looked the same. My breath came in shallow bursts as I heard an unfamiliar sound from across the table. I looked over to see my mother, deathly pale, holding a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Mom,” she choked.
Grandma put her fork down and calmly dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, looking at the effect she’d had on us. “Such a fuss. I’ll be back in a week or two. And I’ll have my Apple phone thing with me.”
“Wha—what are you talking about?”
“I’m going home. To Hereford. Tomorrow.”
“You’re . . . what?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“I have some business to attend to.”
“What business?”
“My own.” She crossed her arms.
My mom looked at her mother warily. “How are you getting there?”
“Why, driving of course.”
“Absolutely not.”
Grandma perked up significantly at her daughter’s declaration of war. “Absolutely yes. I’ve driven there a thousand times.”
“Not in the last thirty years!”
“You don’t know everything I’ve done. And I’d like to see you try to stop me.”
“Mom. You’re almost ninety. You can’t drive from Maryland to Massachusetts.”
“Watch me.”
My mom opened her mouth to argue, but a voice stopped her. “I’ll drive her.”
The voice was mine.
“You?” Mom asked.
I found myself nodding.
Grandma leaned back in her chair, looking at me appraisingly. “Why?”
“I—” I didn’t know the answer. I turned to my mother. “You said I needed to get out—”
“I meant on a date!”
“And . . . well . . . I’ve never been to Hereford.”
“Yes, you have,” they said in unison.
“I—I have?”
“We took you when you and Beth were kids,” Mom said. “You loved the beach there.”
I could suddenly picture standing on a rock jetty, watching a tiny snail crawl around a tide pool. “The rocks?”
Grandma nodded. “You’ll know it when you see it. It’s in your blood.”
I wasn’t so sure, but I continued. “And—well—it’d help everyone out. And it’s not like I have anything better to do.”
Grandma cocked her head at me. “Go pack. We leave at eight. I want to be there in time for dinner.”
My mom knocked on my door as I was packing, then came and sat on the edge of my bed. “Grandma went home?” I asked.
“She did. I wish she wouldn’t drive at night, but she refuses to Uber.”
“Can she even work the app?”
“I think she can do a lot more than she lets on.” My mom hesitated. “But she can’t do as much as she thinks she can anymore either. Don’t let her push herself too hard.”
I scrunched up my face. “Has anyone ever successfully stopped Grandma from doing anything?”
“Once or twice.” The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “But you need to keep an eye on her. Her heart isn’t what it used to be. She messes up her pills sometimes. And she absolutely cannot drink. Her doctor was crystal clear about that.” My mother now insisted on accompanying my grandma to the doctor, partially because of the mix-up that had occurred with her pills, but mostly because my grandmother was an inveterate liar. If my mom wasn’t in the room, not only would Grandma spin any number of outrageous tales to the doctor, but my mom would never get a straight answer about her mother’s health. I was surprised my grandmother tolerated that invasion of privacy. But it was the one sign that she was, in fact, slowing down somewhat. She would never admit it, but taking the wrong pills and the disorientation that followed had frightened her.