Free The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on My Road Trip with Grandma by Iain Reid

there’s still more she’ll tell me.
    While my notebook was out, I also started a journal of ideas regarding what Grandma and I can do today. I review it now while my computer and I warm up. I read it once and turn it over, hoping to find more ideas on the back of the page. It’s blank. There’s nothing on this list for a rainy day. There are a few points about walking around downtown or driving west to the town of Picton. I’ve reminded myself in terrible penmanship that Picton has some lovely vineyards; we could sample some wine. There’s also a beach in Picton. The last line of my list: We could go for a short walk ON THE SAND !!
    I rip out this useless page of notes, crumple it, and drop it into my wastebasket like an orange peel. My penmanship really is alarming. I always just assumed it would get better, the way I knew I would grow taller. But it never happened. Now I’m a tall man with the handwriting of an eight-year-old boy.
    Of course I still don’t have any hot water. I tracked down the appropriate fellow on the phone yesterday before leaving to pick up Grandma. The earliest he can come is tomorrow. Not to worry — if Grandma really needs a wash, I’m sure she won’t mind soup-ladling some lukewarm kettle water over herself while leaning over the bathtub. Either that or we could both just stand outside under the rain in our bathing suits and hand a bar of soap back and forth.
    That would also give us something to do today. It would kill at least twenty minutes.
    Then again, maybe the rain will stop by the afternoon and we’ll have time to drive to Picton and those vineyards, to the beach and the sand. For now, I can hear the rain falling relentlessly on the driveway outside my window. It sounds unending and remorseless. It sounds bored.
    *
    I’VE BEEN KNOCKING about the kitchen for ten minutes, maybe fifteen, the way I always am, putting dishes away, grinding coffee beans, when Grandma shuffles in. She’s wearing her thin pink slippers. This is what I was most concerned about: the mornings. For people who live on their own, every form of human interaction is amplified in the morning.
    I’ve noticed that Grandma enters rooms almost silently. After spending a day or two with most people, I can recognize their blunt footsteps as easily as their face or voice. And it irritates me. Most drag their feet or drop them inattentively. Grandma doesn’t step so much as glide around. She skates. She floats.
    I’m clad in my customary basketball shorts, undershirt, and housecoat. Grandma’s already meticulously dressed. You’d think she was expecting company. She has that same brooch clipped to a voguish charcoal sweater. Her hair is neatly combed (of course). I look down at my frayed housecoat. The last time a comb or brush of any kind made contact with my hair, people were still smoking on airplanes.
    The only evidence of recent slumber is her hardly-puffy eyes. Everything about my fish-eyed, bloated reflection in the metal kettle — the stubble, the dark circles under my eyes, the morning horns — screams that I just woke up.
    â€œGood morning, Grandma!” I finally say, pushing the start button on the coffee maker. I’ve waited until she was present. I want her to know it’s a fresh batch. I’m trying to sound as friendly and warm and awake and welcoming and cheery and dashing and happy and excited and all-American-grandsony as possible. I’m not used to employing my vocal cords first thing.
    â€œWell, good morning!” she answers. Like her face, Grandma’s voice carries none of the baggage of sleep the way mine does. “Still looks a little wet out there today, doesn’t it?”
    â€œYeah. Bit of a shame, really,” I say, clearing my throat for the third or fourth time.
    â€œAnd how did you sleep?”
    â€œPretty good, I guess. Not bad. How about you?”
    â€œDo you even have to