Free The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

enveloped me.
    “Hi, Grammy,” I said.
    “New haircut?” She squinted at me as she lowered herself into a chair.
    I nodded. “Bangs.”
    She gave a sagely nod. “I’ve always said bangs would look good on you, Katie.”
    “Paige.” This only happened once in a while, my grandmother calling me by my mother’s name.
    My grandma blinked a few times and then laughed, a bit embarrassed. “Silly me. Did I call you Katie? You just look so much like your mother did when she was a girl. Only now you have bangs.”
    “Bangs that my mother hates ,” I said. “Of course.”
    “She said that?” Her frown deepened the delicate wrinkles by her mouth.
    I sighed, remembering my mother’s terse tone in the car on the way here. “Well, she hates that I cut them without asking her.”
    “Oh, she’ll get over it.”
    Sometimes I couldn’t believe that it was my grandmother who raised my mom. I didn’t remember my grandfather, but I knew he was a marine. Maybe that’s where my mom got her strict rules and military-grade enforcement of a curfew. We were quiet for a few moments while I lost myself in thinking about my mom. And my dad. And my mom and dad.
    “My goodness, dear.” My grandmother peered at me from across the kitchen table. “You look like you have something heavy on your mind. Is it the dream again?”
    She meant the drowning nightmare, which only she and the therapist knew about. As far as I could tell, it was one of the last things my grandmother retained before her memory loss worsened.
    “No. It’s not that. Did you know,” I began, trying to sound calm, “that my mom and dad. Are dating. Each other?”
    She sucked in her breath. “I think I may have heard something about that. Are you sure?”
    This was the Alzheimer’s at work. My mom had surely told her already, but that conversation would seem dreamlike, confusing for my grandmother to recollect.
    “I’m positive.”
    “Goodness me.”
    “I … feel …” The words scattered in my mind, and Iheld my hands up in bewildered surrender. My mouth was still halfway open, thoughts stillborn. But no matter how I searched, there was no candy coating on the truth of my feelings. “I feel like a horrible daughter.”
    With my free hand, I began plucking more M&M’S out of the trail mix in front of me and lining them up beside the bowl. “I know I’m supposed to be happy. All divorce-casualty kids want their parents to get back together.”
    Her lips curved into a sad smile. “You’re afraid to get your hopes up.”
    “Yes.” I exhaled all the air from my lungs, forming a more dramatic sigh than I intended. “I am. Because I already know how this ends.”
    She tightened her hand over mine. Her nonchalance alarmed me, given that this should feel like new information to her.
    “Don’t you think it’s a mistake?” I asked. I needed to know what she remembered, now that her long-term memory was stronger than the final years of my parents’ marriage. “Like … they’re not compatible, no matter how much they want to be?”
    “Oh, honey,” my grandmother said. “It’s more complicated than that. Your parents, they were so happy together those first few years.”
    “They were?” I started arranging the blue M&M’S into a line.
    My grandmother nodded.
    I’d once found a photo of my parents on their wedding day, in the bottom of my mother’s jewelry drawer. I sneaked back in dozens of times over the years to study it. In the soft light of the photograph, they were exiting the church, beaming sideways at the camera. They looked at ease beside each other, young and golden. They weren’t the parents that I knew.
    “Then what happened ?” It’s a morbid curiosity, the search for relationship fissures—like searching for a cause of death. I knew it wouldn’t change anything, but I still had to know.
    “Things change. There are so many outside forces coming at marriage; finances and jobs and houses and children. You can lose each other