Free Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) by Kevin Brockmeier

abruptly—for a moment it seems that he has simply dissolved away— but then his head appears from around the corner and he waves good-bye.
    When it becomes clear that he is not going to return, Katherine takes her granddaughter by the shoulder and asks her if she is ready to go. Robin is clutching her coloring book in a rolled-up tube, staring up the aisle as if a train has just departed there.
    “Where did he go?” she says.
    Katherine makes a wide, stumped gesture with her arms. “I have no idea,” she says.
    Robin thinks for a moment. A pale fluorescent light flickers overhead, and a shopping cart with an unpinned wheel jerks past. “I like him,” she finally says.
    On Sunday Katherine visits her mother at the Briarwood Nursing Facility, a converted hotel in the center of the downtown business district. She is lying in her bedroom, her head propped crookedly on a pillow, and a flower pot is tucked beneath her arm. Katherine can see that this is one of her bad days. She seats herself on the edge of the bed and leans over, placing a kiss on her mother’s forehead. There is a fog of misunderstanding in her eyes.
    “Mom,” Katherine says, smoothing the skin of her hand. “Mom, do you recognize me?”
    “Hello, dear,” her mother says. Then adds, after a moment, “Katherine.”
    “How have you been?” Katherine asks. “Have you been sleeping well?”
    “Look at that giant woman,” her mother says. She gestures weakly toward the window, which presents to her room a view of a billboard. Giant woman? The model in the advertisement holds a long brown cigarette in the crook of her fingers. The left half of her body has come unglued, stripped from the billboard like bark from a birch tree. It hangs past the walkway and twists loosely in the high breeze, and in the opening it leaves Katherine can see the face and arm of another woman, larger than the first, fingering the stem of a cocktail glass.
    “She’s splitting in two,” says her mother, “but she’s still laughing. Why do you think she’s still laughing? Do you suppose it tickles to have her in there?”
    Katherine guesses that the “her” her mother is referring to is the second woman, the one inside the other.
    “I wish you had a better view, Mom. Have you asked the nurses about being moved to the other side of the building?”
    Her mother does not answer.
    “I can talk to someone for you if you’d like.”
    She closes her eyes, her plum-colored eyelids shivering once or twice behind thick spectacles.
    Katherine has just begun to think that she has fallen asleep— lately her mother seems to drop away instantaneously—when suddenly she breaks the silence. “Tell that boy to visit,” she says. Her eyes are still shut. “Tanner. That son of yours. I’d like to see my great grand-”—her voice fades away for a moment and she opens her eyes—“daughter.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    A man with an aluminum walker scuffs by in the hallway, and a car horn sounds on the street. There is an air of stillness and exhaustion in the building, a forgetfulness in the faces of the nurses and residents. It is as if the days and months and even the seasons here are without aim or effect or intelligibility.
    “Let me tell you about my week,” says Katherine. “I took Robin to lunch yesterday. We ate at KidBurgers. Did you know that she dips her french fries just like Tanner does? He learned it from his dad, and she learned it from him. It made me think of all the things I’ve learned from you, all the little habits and mannerisms. I still carry extra buttons in my wallet, did you know that? Just like you always did. I still eat my meals one ingredient at a time and I still wait for the third ring before I answer the phone. That’s what makes us family, I think—little things like that . . . What else happened this week? I met a man at work—”
    “He always leaves that there,” her mother says, grimacing.
    “Pardon?”
    Her mother looks toward the