Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Climbing the stairs that led up to the street nearly killed me: I had to stop twice and take a breath of freezing air before I could push through the pain. But then I was at the top and I put my head down and just went for it: along the street, through the doors of the care facility, past the nurses’s station and into her room—
My grandmother, Babette—she’s always insisted I call her Baba—is 5’8” and built, in her words, like a dockworker. When she was a nurse, she could heave even the biggest patients onto gurneys and more than once she punched out some drunk guy who tried to grope her. But now, nestled in a drab, high-backed chair, she looked tiny.
I pasted a happy smile on my face even as my heart broke inside. “Hey! Sorry I’m late.” I hurried over and hugged her. Her right arm gave me a weak little squeeze...but only her right arm.
It had happened three months ago. She’d been carrying a bag of groceries in from the car when she staggered sideways and just crumpled, hitting her head on a wall as she went down. The paramedics rushed her to the hospital and the doctors confirmed she’d suffered a massive stroke.
She was out of danger, now, but she wasn’t recovering as the doctors had hoped. And I knew this place was part of the reason. The room, with its cracked, faded yellow paint, felt more like a cell. Baba needed physiotherapy and stimulation to help her brain regrow all the connections it had lost. But the staff barely came into her room. Her plates from breakfast and lunch were still sitting in the corner and the puzzle books and word games I’d bought were in an untouched stack on the shelf. I wanted to scream in frustration but there was nothing I could do: Baba needed twenty-four-hour care which I couldn’t give her at home, and this place was the best I could afford.
I blinked hard: I’d save the crying for when I got home. “Have you eaten?” I asked. Both of us glanced sadly down at the plate of rubbery tubes in watery sauce that the care facility called pasta. “Can’t say I blame you,” I deadpanned. “Why don’t I run down the street and get you something?”
I brought her some hot food and helped her eat. Then I read to her until the nurses told me I had to go.
I hadn’t eaten all day so when I got back to my apartment, I dug around in the refrigerator and made myself a sandwich. Maybe I’m weird but sandwiches have always been my comfort food: there’s no other food where you can customize it to your exact mood. Right now, I need pastrami and cheese and extra pickles, and chips, lots of chips. I layered it all into a huge, bursting-at-the-seams sandwich, poured a glass of milk and then huddled in bed to eat it because it was too cold anywhere else.
But even when I was full, and I’d stopped shivering, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my bank account, which had been dropping deeper and deeper into the red each month. The tiny salary I paid myself barely brought it back into the black before bills and the cost of Baba’s care facility slammed it down into the red again. I was barely able to afford groceries: luxuries like new clothes were a distant memory. And then there was the store, a whole different level of worry.
It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, there was a bouncy eight-year-old who loved swimming, board games and, above all, books. My parents had always been big readers, and they got me reading early. I’d lie for hours stretched out on my stomach, chin propped on one hand, utterly still apart from the slow turning of pages. I was a princess, a starship commander, a farmer with a family of talking mice...
And then one day, I came home from a weekend with Baba and my own story just...stopped, like someone had torn out the rest of my book.
I remember Baba clutching me to her chest as I sobbed into her dress. She was struggling not to cry herself: she’d just lost her son and daughter-in-law. “We’ll get through this,” she told me. “The two of us.”
Suddenly, at fifty-eight, Baba had to become a mother again. I moved into her tiny apartment, and we did our best to make it work. She put in long shifts at the hospital to pay the bills and I helped where I could. I’d always had a weird, analytical brain, obsessing over tweaking systems and making things mesh: that’s why I liked board games so much. I put it to work organizing rotas, meal planning and clipping coupons. College was out of the question so when I left school, I got a job working in a grocery store.