I pressed my fingers to my temples to fight the emerging stress headache and then pushed her wheelchair to the other side to wait. Hopefully the resort has massages. I’ll charge it to the room. My parents owe me.
“That’s a mistake,” I told the man at the front desk. “We have two separate rooms.”
He checked his computer screen again, and then gestured for a woman to come over.
“What seems to be the problem?” she asked in lightly accented English.
“My grandmother and I are supposed to have separate rooms.”
The woman checked the computer screen and tapped the keyboard a few times. “No,” she said. “It says right here that you’re booked into a junior king suite together.”
“All set?” my grandmother asked, wandering back over. She already had some kind of tropical drink with six pieces of fruit stacked on a skewer and a straw with an umbrella.
“No,” I said, then turned back to the woman behind the desk. “You need to fix this. We need two separate rooms.”
“Oh,” Grandma said. “I called the agent and said I was rooming with you.”
“You did what?”
“Why should we pay for two rooms? It’s not like you have a date.” She took a sip of her drink. “If you want to bring a man back to the room, just tell me and I’ll go to the pool or Ken and Louise’s room for a bit.” My mouth dropped open in shock. “What? We’re on vacation.”
“We need two rooms,” I said to the desk clerk, who had the good sense to wipe the look of enjoyment off her face.
“Everything is booked, I’m afraid. We have eight weddings and three anniversary parties this weekend.”
My grandmother smiled at me. “Hi, roomie.”
Well, dear readers, I have hit rock bottom. I am no longer dateless at my younger brother’s tropical destination wedding. Instead, my date is my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother, who cancelled her reservation for a separate room without telling me.
As I write this, she is sitting naked in a heart-shaped hot tub in our room, drinking some kind of daiquiri （her third!）， and watching a telenovela with English subtitles. I was called a prude for asking if she could please put her bathing suit on. The room has a single king-size bed and a foldout sofa, which she told me I was a fool for planning to sleep on instead of sharing the bed with her because it would destroy my back. And by the way, she sleeps in the nude too.
Sofa bed it is.
And because it wouldn’t truly be rock bottom without the implication of my promiscuity in front of random strangers, she told me at the reception desk to just let her know （Via sock on the door, maybe? Apparently my grandmother is cooler than I am too. Another dagger to the heart!） if I wanted to bring a gentleman caller back to the room for a visit and she would make herself scarce. Which brings me to my next greatest fear: that I will return from the rehearsal dinner tonight to one of her compression socks on the door.
At which point will all of Mexico’s great tequila wash that vision from my eyes?
Stay tuned. I’m sure saying “I’ve hit rock bottom” is the same as saying, “I’ll be right back” in a horror movie and something inherently worse is about to happen.
“Joan!” my grandmother called to me from the hot tub. I had taken my laptop out to the balcony to write a new post as soon as she began stripping to climb into the tub. “Can you call room service? I need another dirty monkey.”
She’s requesting another drink, I wrote. So I have to sign off. Wish me luck!
I hit “Publish,” then told her I would.
Ah, so your grandma has reached the stage of life where she doesn’t give a fuck, Alex texted when I told him what was going on.
Less than zero fucks given. But she told me to just let her know if I want to bring a guy back and she’ll go hang out by the pool.
He replied with three crying-laughing emojis.
I should have just lied and said you and I were together so I wouldn’t have to come to this alone, I said.
The three dots appeared to show he was typing, then they disappeared. The delay was long enough that I wondered if I shouldn’t have said that. The connotation of us sharing a room in Mexico could have been less than platonic, after all.
Next time, he finally wrote.
Next time one of my siblings gets married in Mexico?
Yeah.
You’re so helpful right now.
He replied with a winking face, which seemed to end the conversation. If I misspoke, I misspoke. I couldn’t deal with more drama, not with the rehearsal dinner that night and wedding the next day.