“Let’s get our bags checked and go through security, then you two can worry about hats.” I guided them toward the check-in desk.
Checking the bags was easy. Security was a different matter. “What’s taking so long?” my grandmother asked.
“You have to take off your shoes and take all of the liquids out of your bag,” I explained. “It means security takes longer.”
“I’m not taking off my shoes.”
“Everyone does. It’s the law now.”
“Since when?”
I outlined the brief history of terrorism to my grandmother and her friends, who apparently were last frequent fliers in the 1960s. I prayed none of them tried to smoke on the airplane.
“I have to take off my shoes because they think I have a bomb?”
“Shh, Grandma, you’re not supposed to say ‘bomb’ at the airport.”
“Now I know you’re making this up, Joan. I’ll prove it to you. Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb!” She looked at me defiantly. “What are they going to do? Arrest me?”
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “They are. So please just stop.”
“You’re so serious.” She turned to Louise. “How did I wind up with such a serious grandchild?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Louise said mildly. “But my Billy is the same way.” “Her Billy” was a thirty-eight-year-old proctologist who had gone by William since he was nine.
Louise and Ken removed their shoes when it was time. My grandmother didn’t. And because she was in a wheelchair, no one said a word. She smirked at me triumphantly. I just shook my head and went to get a gigantic coffee as soon as I had deposited the three of them at our gate.
We had almost an hour left until takeoff. Armed with enough caffeine to face the elderly again, I started drafting a blog post from my phone.
This is gold, I thought as I typed. Everyone will think it’s fiction, but damn, it’s good material.
I proofread quickly and posted it, just before they started preboarding.
My father was right about the benefits of having Ken and Louise on the plane. The three of them sat in a row together, leaving me twenty-two glorious inches of aisle freedom. And because none of them would willingly wear their hearing aids or admit that they couldn’t hear without them, conversation across that great divide proved futile.
I put in my earphones, pulled out my Kindle, and for the first time in weeks felt myself begin to relax.
When the time came to fill out the paperwork for entering Mexico, I leaned across the aisle and told my grandmother I would fill hers out for her. “Thank you, Joanie,” she said. “Your grandfather always did that.”
“No problem, Grandma.” I had given up correcting her on my name. I filled in the necessary information, and as soon as we had landed, I turned airplane mode off on my phone.
It took a minute to connect to the Mexican LTE signal. When it finally did, I began downloading my emails. There were thirty-two of them to my personal account.
Oh God, I thought. What fresh hell is going on with the wicked bridesmaids of the west now?
But none of them were about Caryn’s shower or bachelorette party. Instead there were seventeen likes on the blog post, and nine comments and six new followers on my blog.
I felt a rush of nervous excitement. The highest number of comments I had gotten on a post so far was four, and that had taken almost two weeks to accomplish. I scrolled through.
“Hysterical!”
“Oh my God, please update this with more.”
“Is this for real? Which airport just let her through security like that?”
“Can your grandma be my friend? I want to be exactly like her.”
“Why do I need a passport? Classic!”
And so on.
I checked the blog stats and saw a lot of the new traffic was coming from social media sites, which meant people had started sharing it with their friends. I smiled broadly as another email came in.
Not that I could bask in that glory for long, because getting my grandmother and her friends through customs proved challenging, as Ken and Louise were stopped for discrepancies on their customs forms.
“Here,” Louise said to my grandmother. “Just take my purse through for me. I’ll be out in a minute.”
We’re going to Mexican prison, I thought, handing Louise back her bag.
“What’s wrong with you?” my grandmother asked. “I carry stuff for other people all the time.”
“Through customs?”
“Sure.”