During the drive home, Grandma stared through the window, her hands folded quietly in her lap. She did not ask why her own children had done it. She did not ask for the money back. She only said, after a long silence somewhere around the second exit, “I should have known kindness that sudden was being purchased with something.”
For three weeks after that, we lived quietly together. I moved a few things into her guest room, told myself it was temporary, told my own landlord I’d be staying with family for a while. We drank tea every morning at her kitchen table, the same table where she and Grandpa had once done the company’s books by hand. She watered her roses. I canceled the hotels I’d booked for myself as part of the trip and ignored the increasingly indignant messages my father started sending, accusing me of ruining the family vacation, of taking sides, of being dramatic exactly the way my aunt had accused Grandma of being.
