“I don’t want an apology while everyone is watching,” she said.
Dad swallowed. “Mom, please.”
“You can visit me after the first payment clears,” she said. “But for now, I don’t want to see you.”
His face twisted. “So Drea turned you against your own son?”
Grandma Elsie looked at me, then back at him.
“No,” she said. “Drea came to get me. You left me there.”
That was the moment he lost the room.
“But for now, I don’t want to see you.”
***
Six months later, I’d passed my finals, graduated, and framed my diploma in Grandma Elsie’s apartment because she cried harder than I did.
Dad had made four payments. Not happily, but on time.
Mom made sure of that.
Those payments became something real, not Paris yet, but a plane ticket to Montreal.
At the airport, Grandma Elsie adjusted the blue scarf. “It still counts as abroad, right?”
“It absolutely counts,” I said, handing her the boarding pass. “Check it.”
Dad had made four payments.
She smiled. “You already checked it.”
“Check it again.”
She looked down.
“Elsie,” she read.
“And the seat?”
Her mouth trembled. “Window.”
I held out my hand. She took it.
“You already checked it.”
***
On the plane, she pressed near the window as the runway lights blurred beneath us. I took a photo before she noticed.
When we got home, I put it in a new album.
Under it, I wrote three words.
Grandma was here.
And this time, no one forgot her ticket.
