I had to go see my grandmother. Mom and Dad and I talked it out. I needed to fly up and see how she was doing, check in on her nurses, and make a plan about where she would live. Dad had her on the waiting list at a home in Orono, but until there was room she had a daily nurse who took care of her a few hours a day. The nurse reported that my grandmother was not doing well. Her memory was worsening; she was losing her ability to remember anything, and I knew it was time. I had to go.

I flew up for the weekend, promising myself that soon I would go for longer. Once Magnus was back. Zach and Quentin knew the drill, they would call me if Magnus arrived. And he would understand. I knew it, but it was still hard to leave.

My grandparents had lived in this house, in town, for as long as I could remember.

“Grandma?” I knocked and pushed open the front door. “Are you home? It’s me, Katie, your granddaughter.”

My grandmother came around the corner from the kitchen wiping her hands on an apron, squinting at the front door. “Now who on earth is it there?”

“It’s me, Katie.” She looked at me blankly. “Kaitlyn Sheffield, John’s daughter, your grand daughter?”

“Ah!” She said like that explained it, then looked confused again. “Katie is a little girl, you can’t be Katie…” Her face fell with worry.

“But I am Grandma. It’s me, Katie. You just haven’t seen me in a while because I’ve been in California. Now I live down the street from your son, John.” I walked in and put my overnight bag by the couch. Smoke wafted out of the kitchen. “Is Marsha here, are you baking?”

Grandma looked down, wringing her hands.

I implemented Steamroller Protocol: barge in, take over, repeat who I was, and continuously tell her it was okay. “Everything’s cool Grandma. It’s me, Katie. Are you cooking something?”

In stalked past her. Smoke billowed out of the oven. I located oven mitts and extracted a tray of what looked like it was once cheese toast, but was now charcoal. It could have been a fire. “You’re cooking. When I used to visit you in the summers we loved to cook together. Do you remember Grandma? We cooked elaborate experimental meals. Me and you, little Katie and her grandma. Cooking.”

“Little Katie loved cooking.”

“Yes, I do. I love to cook. And I love visiting my grandma Barb.” I scrolled through my contacts and found Marsha’s phone number and called it.

She answered, “Hello?”

“Hi Marsha, it’s Katie Sheffield. I’m here at Barb’s house, and um, she’s just burned a tray of cheese toast.”

Marsha’s voice said, “She’s not allowed to cook if I’m not there.”

“Yeah, of course, um what time are you coming today?”

“Today I don’t come until three.”

It was eleven. The house would have been burned down by then or who knows what. “Okay, I’ll see you at three.” I hung up.

“So Grandma, me and you, little Katie, your granddaughter and you, Barb, my grandma are going to have a really nice visit this weekend—“

“Katie?”

“Yes!” I rushed to my bag and pulled out a box of photos. “I have photos, would you like to see them? Of me, little Katie?” I cleared a place at the table and put down the box.

My grandmother said, “Little Katie, you have grown up.”

“I have, I’m all grown up now. I’m even married.”

“Aw, that’s wonderful dear.”

I pulled out a handful of photos and starting with my childhood showed them to her talking about each one. Eventually she was used to the fact that I was her granddaughter. But then she became confused about where her husband was, and I had to start a whole new kind of steamroll, “Grandpa Jack isn’t here anymore. He’s with God now. He passed away and went to heaven about four years ago, and you were very sad. And I was very sad. But the ceremony was just lovely and now—“

“Jack is gone…”

“He is Grandma, but you’ll see him sometime, in the next life. He’s waiting for you.”

“Remember that time he got lost at Disney world? We couldn’t find him for so long, but then he was sitting right in front of the Lost Child office. He was fifty, but they had given him some ears to wear on his head and a sticker with his name on it?”

“I do, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was five years old at the time.“

She giggled. I could see from the sparkle in her eyes that this was a good visual memory. I grabbed another handful of photos and looked through it for scenes from that day. I found one, me and Grandpa holding hands. It was before he had gotten lost. Grandma screwed up her mouth confused. “That’s you, Katie, but that’s…”

“That’s Grandpa, Jack, your husband of fifty-five years. Those are good memories aren’t they Grandma?”

She nodded.

“Are you hungry?”

“I am. I could use a bite, would you like me to make you something?”

“I’d like to make you something.” I opened the cupboards, which were mostly empty and the fridge which was also mostly empty. My hope was the lack of food was to keep Grandma from making her own meals, but also, what did she eat when no one was here? Would Marsha go by the store on her way here? And why didn’t Dad have a plan for this?

Because she was so far away; it was easy to forget she needed us.

There was some bread and more cheese, so I made some new cheese toast. I slid it under the broiler for a minute then placed it in front of her.

“Thank you, dear.” She ate happily and then grinned. “You remind me a lot of my Katie.”

“I am Katie.”

“Of course, that makes perfect sense.” She chewed another bite. “Show me more of your photos.”

“Sure.” I showed her photos of me at my high school graduation. One of me wearing my prom dress standing beside James. And a photo of me in my college dorm. None of these made much of an impression. Her memory was so much worse than last time I was here, two long years ago. Steamroller Protocol was entirely different on the phone when I couldn’t see how confused she looked.

I sifted through a stack of photos with Braden in them. My Los Angeles years had been all about him. I shoved them to the side to toss in the trash.

“Grandma I wanted to show you photos of my wedding.”

She clapped her hands happily. “I love weddings! Have I ever told you about my wedding?”

I stopped mid-search and listened. These moments were too fleeting to not give it my full attention.

“He was home from the Vietnam war and my dress was spectacular, cinched so tight around my waist that it’s a wonder I didn’t faint away when he said his vows.” Her eyes went faraway like she pictured it.

“I thought I was going to faint too, Grandma, during our ceremony. We had our hands tied together. And it was intense and also beautiful.”

“That’s a Celtic tradition, Handfasting.”

“My husband is Scottish. So that’s why we did it. And it was beautiful.”

“I remember I couldn’t look at him. If I looked up I was going to hyperventilate, instead I just looked at my knuckles.”

“Me too! I focused on our hands and tried to remember to breathe through it.”

My grandmother clasped her hands together. “Oh, it is such a wonderful thing to be married to someone. You will hate him and love him and want to escape him and infuriate him, sometimes all in the same hour, but also, if he is devoted and fair and even-tempered, you’ve got a good road ahead of you.”

“Grandpa was all those things, wasn’t he?”

“He was a good man.”

“I think my husband is all of those things too. It’s still so new, and it’s complicated because we’re so different. But he’s adaptable and has a good spirit.”

“That’s wonderful dear. Can I see the photos?”

I had put them in the box precisely to show her so I got to them easily and spread them out on the table. The photos of me and Magnus in our wedding clothes on the back deck of our house, on the front steps of the church, and leaned together in front of our decadent wedding feast. I loved that photo so much, how we were together, married, but that lean was one of our first times touching each other. It was as much a promise as our oaths had been hours before. Because it was us, together, now—

“Is that Magnus Cam—“ She peered at the photo and another one. “Why it is, it’s Magnus Campbell, did you marry our Magnus, Katie?”

I stared at her dumbfounded.

“Such a nice boy. From Scotland. Oh that’s right, you said your husband was from Scotland. I might have put the two together—“

“Grandma, how do you know Magnus?”

“He used to live here. Remember back when your grandpa and I would take in the university students? When was that, back in the early nineties, I think? Was that before you were born? It was mostly students from Jack’s classes, but then Magnus came along… I’m not sure exactly how we met him, but he stayed here for a couple of months and really became like family. You remember, I’m sure we talked about Magnus before.”

My eyes welled up with tears. I shook my head. “I don’t remember you ever mentioning him.”

“He was like a son, such a sweet boy.” She stood and went to her bookcase and ran a finger along a row of photo album spines with tags that said: 1984-86, 1984-graduation, 1987-Europe, etcetera, and pulled one off the shelf and returned with it. She flipped through a few pages and pointed. “There he is, at our lake house, with your grandpa.”

I sobbed while smiling looking down on the photo. The photo page was antiqued from time — twenty-five years ago.

My grandpa was young, smiling and waving. The lake behind them. Their bare feet on my family’s dock — a place I hadn’t seen in years — and Magnus, smiling, tanned, waving, an arm around my grandpa. Grandpa’s arm around Magnus. There was so much going on in my heart and mind that I didn’t know what to say.

“Why was he here?”

My grandmother was looking at other pages, but it was the only photo of Magnus in the book. “Oh he was an exchange student or something, or—“ She looked up at the ceiling. “Funny, the memory is clear as day. He was working on a math equation. He had a bunch of numbers, longitudes and star charts, and was always thinking on it. Jack took him to the university, and he talked to professors there about it. At night we sat around the table with books open, talking and trying to solve it. It was all so much fun. I suppose it was his graduate thesis or something that part is a little hazy now. But it’s been twenty-five years, you know.”

She leaned back in her chair. Looked at the ceiling for a moment. I was worried she might have questions about Magnus’s age, or her memory, or why it was so clear, or anything, but then she returned to my wedding photos. “This is lovely dear. It is so good to see Magnus again. You’ll have to bring him here, next trip. I know Jack would love to…” Her voice trailed off and she looked around confused.

I put the photos back in the boxes and returned her photo album to the shelf. I spent the rest of the weekend kind of looking for a note or message though I wasn’t sure where one would be. And how would it last for twenty-five years?

I opened up the back of frames and looked on the underside of the guest room furniture, but really — I had my message. Magnus come to my grandparents’ house. They helped him work his equations. Grandma thought of him like family. I felt warm inside, happy. He was coming home. It was just a matter of time.

But the warm family feeling about Magnus also felt like a sign. If Magnus was a part of Grandma’s family, and mine, shouldn’t she be a part of the family again, too? And we all lived in Florida.

So I made a unilateral decision to move her to Amelia Island. I argued it out with Mom and Dad. I packed her suitcase, bought her a ticket, and brought her home on the plane.

She stayed in the guest room newly vacated by Zach and Emma, and by Tuesday she was on a shortlist for a spot at a local assisted-living facility. A moving company would pack up her things and bring them down.