“Grandma. You’re not wet anymore. You’re okay.”
I never forgot that image: my grandmother, who could face down a rabid raccoon with a broom, brought low by water . The trouble began, as trouble often does, on an ordinary Tuesday. I was fifteen, visiting for two weeks while my parents sorted out “some things” (a phrase that always meant money). It was July in Kansas, which is to say the air had the consistency of a wet wool blanket. Grandma’s farmhouse had no air conditioning, just a rattling fan and the philosophy that heat builds character .
Only this time, she wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t angry. She reached out her free hand and touched my dripping chin, and she smiled—a real smile, the kind I hadn’t seen since she taught me to drive in her old Ford pickup.
The dashes were pauses. The “-Final-” was an ending. The “By...” was an invitation to fill in the author’s name—your name, or mine, or anyone who has ever loved someone too afraid to get wet.
“Crazy old woman,” she muttered.
“You’re wet,” she said again, softer. “Just like that boy. Just like my brother. All wet and shivering and alive.”
She never learned to swim. She never took a bath without leaving the bathroom door open. And for seventy years, she never, ever talked about it. Fast-forward thirty years. I am forty-five. Grandma is ninety-seven and has outlived everyone except me and a cousin who lives in Oregon and sends checks instead of visits. The farmhouse is gone—sold after her second husband died—and she lives now in a long-term care facility called Golden Pines, which is less golden and more pine-scented bleach.