The grandmother never existed. I made her up — the convalescent home, the diabetes, a high school lie. Her name was Betsy, and she never asked for candy, or walked me through the Depression. Hand-made soap, aero-planes — the whole shebang kinda not true. But she was a good ol’ gal, always ready to listen to my teen-boy problems, so open to “these new-fangled relationships” — “It’s not like we didn’t mess around in our day,” she once said. “Just don’t get anyone pregnant!” She knew there was no girl, nodded when I told her how all my friends — you — stared at me like I had depth, like I was heroic just for visiting The Elderly. Well, Betsy would’a liked that. She would’a liked that just fine. If she had ever existed.
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