Isit down on my grandma’s plush green footrest and squirm uncomfortably at something pushing up underneath me. I lift myself up and pull out a tab that’s come loose from its embedded space and toss it off the edge of the sickly green footrest like a dislocated eyeball.

My grandma waddles in to the living room from the kitchen, balancing an antique walnut serving tray with a steaming tea set sliding around on it.

“Can I get that for you?” I ask.

“For who?” she replies. Grandma continues, soft-shoeing her way across the threadbare carpet. Her staticky housedress clings with unflattering tightness around her legs.

“Oh, you sat in the dog’s seat,” she chuckles as she places the tray on her creaking wicker coffee table. She pours decaffeinated coffee into two old china mugs, repeating the same motion that had advanced all the way to first nature through her eighty-five years. I can’t help but wonder how many gallons of coffee have been poured by her hands.

She hands me a cup. “Thank you, grandma,” I say.

“Would you like some sugar?” she asks.

“No, thank you. Never the first cup of the day.” She tosses a couple spoonfuls in her cup. Not too long ago, that sugar container was peppered with mouse turds.

The sun streams in through her windows. Her house always seems lit by angels. No matter how long I’m away, I can always clearly remember where every piece of furniture is laid, and recall how some childhood memory canonized it in my mind. My grandpa would read to me on the red leather claw-foot armchair; grandma held back tears at the dining room table while we all discussed grandpa’s funeral; the china cabinet that held silverware from the dust of generations. Even after my grandparents and their furniture moved, I took to unconsciously memorizing the same items in their new house.

“How’s Anja?” grandma asks.

“She’s fine. She misses me a lot.”

“When are you going to marry that girl?” she asks before nibbling on a vanilla cookie.

I laugh, a little embarrassed. “Maybe when she finishes college.”

“You should do it soon. Mark my words. You should ask her before someone else comes along and does it for you.” Her quavering old woman’s voice is full of portent. “I know what I’m talking about. She won’t wait forever for you. I like that Anja. She’s a fine young woman.”

I sip my coffee and move my hand up and down the side of the soft forest-green footrest.

“Oh,” grandma says full of surprise, “don’t forget to remind me to feed Benny after coffee.”

“Okay, grandma.”

Grandma’s got slick traces of brown coffee sluicing through the wrinkles around her mouth. A huge crumb, impossible to ignore, sits defiantly on her upper lip. I have to look away, but I don’t. She’s staring past my head, into the off-white wall, and I wonder what she’s thinking about. I am hoping it is something, at least.

“You know, your mother was so kind in getting me Benny. He’s such a good dog. Loves that seat you’re on. He’s such good company, especially after working in the garden.”

I make like I’m rubbing something out of my eye, but I’m wincing. I saw her garden when driving in. Unless she’s trying to grow rocks, weeds, and vines, she hasn’t been out there in months.

And now I can’t help but look down and stare at her shoes, with her gray stocking-clad swollen ankles overflowing in them. I don’t want to notice her thin spider web hair, or the way moles and blue inkstain veins have conquered her arms, but I do. It’s already processed and my image of my grandmother has shifted to this. For years, my mental file photo of her was of a plump, matronly—dignified—woman, full of bite and wit. Her brain was her hallmark; why I loved her so much. And now it’s cannibalizing itself. Her voice is the same, and perhaps that’s the worst part. A dark, banished part of me, a part that I’ve beaten senseless so often before, has come back, full force and unrelenting: the selfish part of me that wants this woman dead so I can have that old picture back.

That part of me hasn’t shut up for years. And it’s loud today.

When coffee is done and we’ve talked about everything from the ladies at her church to what Benny ate today, she gets up and tells me she’ll make me some lunch. I wonder how long it’s been since she went shopping. Her animal oven mitts and sassy dish towels twist and dance as she uses them. The tastes of homemade applesauce and hot dish from years ago run ghostlike though my nose for a moment until that fog of memory melts from my mind and I am no longer a child at her dining room table but myself again: an angry young man sitting on Benny’s death-green footrest, knowing full well that Benny the dog died over a month ago.

If I had the guts, I would unscrew every container in her crowded medicine cabinet and dump it in her afternoon tea. I foresee the report of a suicidal old lady, so pained by living after her grandson visited that she just had to end it all. It’s all clear. After all, she ignored mouse crap in her sugar. What’s a few thousand milligrams of pain killer?

I can do it. I can do it. And I think I can live with it, as long as I don’t have to watch her twitching and gagging her last moments away.

I’m sweating.

Grandma sets down a couple plates on her dining room table.

“Let me help you with that,” I tell her. I get up off the footrest I’ve spent the last two hours glued to and help her set the table.

Those childhood smells hit my nose again. It’s hot dish. Beef and noodles and tomatoes and all sorts of spices and ingredients I can’t even begin to name because my taste isn’t refined enough to recognize them. But I do know they taste good together. I have known this forever it seems, from the first moment I remember her ringing the dinner bell in her old house and then scooping a load of the dish onto my plate. I remember her teaching me how to say grace. To say Amen. And then we’d eat.

And then I can do it. I can help her. I can, I can, I can.

God damn did it always taste so good.

Grandma’s serving it up to me now. I’ll never make this. I can hardly keep a decent egg sandwich recipe in my head, much less this. Grandma could create dozens more meals for me yet, each one honed and modified over the years for her six children and countless grandchildren. I am but one of those people that love her. As a woman who hardly remembers to cook for herself anymore, she cooked this just for me.

“Thank you, grandma,” I say, and take a bite. “It’s delicious.”