He reminded her about her medicine with a chart he’d drawn in marker.
He sat beside her bed reading comic books whenever she was too tired to talk, doing all the voices.
Then he started sleeping outside her bedroom.
Every night, he dragged his pillow and blanket into the hallway and curled up at her door.
Every morning, I found him there, cheek pressed to the carpet, and carried him back to his own bed.
“Sweetheart, Grandma is safe. I’m right across the hall.”
“I know,” he’d say. “I just need to be close.”
I assumed seeing Grandma so weak had frightened him.
She had looked so small in that hospital bed, with tubes in her arm and the heart monitor beeping.
My brother, Craig, was there too.
He is forty-one, three years older than I am, a fast-talking man who once told our whole family that his gym franchise was about to make him rich.
