JANNIE WAS MORE reserved with her grandma. She moved kind of awkwardly around the room, like she just wasn’t sure how to be herself. Mostly, she hung back by the door until I motioned her over.
“Come here, Janelle. I want to show you and Ali something interesting.”
Ali hung on my arm, and Jannie came to look over my shoulder. It was tight in the little space next to the bed, but I liked us pressed in that way, a unit, hopefully ready for whatever came our way.
I took a picture out of my wallet. It was the one I’d found in Caroline’s apartment, and I’d been carrying it with me.
“Now, this is Nana Mama, your uncle Blake, and me. Way back in 1976, if you can believe it.”
“Daddy! You look ridiculous,” Jannie said, pointing at the red, white, and blue hat jammed onto my seventies Afro. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s called a boater. It was the Bicentennial, America’s two hundredth birthday, and about a million people were wearing them that day. Very few looked so jaunty, though.”
“Oh, that’s really too bad.” Jannie sounded somewhere between embarrassed and filled with pity for her poor, clueless father.
“Anyway,” I went on, “about five minutes after this picture was taken, a big Washington Redskins float came by in the parade. They were throwing out mini footballs, and Blake and I just about lost our minds trying to catch one. We ran after the float for blocks without even a second thought for poor Nana Mama. So you know what happened next, right?”
This was mostly for the kids, but also for Nana—like we were sitting around the kitchen table and she was over at the stove, eavesdropping. I could just imagine her standing there, stirring something good and pretending not to listen in, getting a wisecrack ready for me.
“It took her hours to find us, and let me tell you, when she did, you have never seen Nana that mad in all your life. Not even close.”
Ali stared at Nana, trying to imagine it. “How mad was she? Tell me.”
“Well, do you remember when she quit us and moved out for a while?”
“Yeah.”
“Madder than that, even. And remember when a certain someone”—I poked Ali in the ribs—“ ‘drove’ the vacuum cleaner down the stairs and put scratches all over the wood?”
He played along and dropped his jaw wide open. “Madder than that?”
“Ten times madder, little man.”
“What happened, Daddy?” Jannie chimed in.
The truth was, Nana had slapped both of us across the face—before she hugged us silly and then bought us a couple of red, white, and blue cotton candies, as big as our haircuts, on the way home. She’d always been a little old-school that way, at least back then. Not that I ever held the occasional whupping against her. That’s just the way it was back then. Tough love, but it seemed to work on me.
I picked up her hand and looked at her, so frail and still in the bed, like some kind of place marker for the woman I’d known for so long and loved so dearly, possibly since before I could remember.
“You made sure we never ran off like that again, didn’t you, Regina?”
Two seconds ago, I’d been making jokes. Now I was feeling overwhelmed, and if I had to guess, I’d say I was feeling a lot of the same emotions Nana had that day on the Mall before she found Blake and me, safe and sound.
I was scared and I was desperate, most likely because I was exhausted from fighting back all the worst-case scenarios in my head. More than anything, I wanted our family to be back together, the way it was supposed to be, the way it had always been.
But I doubted it was going to happen, and I couldn’t really face that yet, or maybe ever.
Stay with us, Nana.