On Grandmother’s Couch

The only doctor in Franklin, Idaho, was drunk that night, so a midwife caught my grandmother before she fell onto the rough kitchen table. Eighty-six years later, we sit on her plastic-covered couch, her scarecrow body slumping into mine, hands like orange peel, curled across my forearm, grabbing at almost anything today. Because I have hair, she calls me Nathan—her teenage gardener who says he feels guilty each time my mother pays him. All bald men are Arnold—her husband twenty-eight years dead. Our silent hour is punctuated only by her struggle to breathe through thick phlegm that refuses to rise. I sit, cradling her frame, and count the tiptoe rhythm of her heart, every measure decrescendo.