He receives me in last centuries’ hospital best: blue shirt, grey cardi. He dresses her too: a black hairpin holds back long waves of speckled hair from gray-green ringed irises.

Delicate in weathered banana-pulp skin-paper, they’d hate to rub raw like this before strangers. In bed after lunch, she whispers for him carefully to turn over for her the day’s events and characters, like smoothed rocks. At the bathroom door, my girl-grandma shies, hand curved against wall like I’m a wolf in her house.

I remember his lips a dark mauve, wet, always moving. Purpling and loose now, they dribble tuneless songs to long-knuckled hands above the sink, between doorways and over my tiny tight anxieties.

At the other end of the hallway, his shoulders slope a gentle question mark, traced in my years of absence. I turn mine away, lamely; spoon-face toward elevator.