Page 14 of Sinful in Scrubs

She held out both of her hands and lifted them up to pat my cheek. She was a tiny woman, which always surprised me because my father was slightly taller than average. He wasn’t a walking skyscraper like Marcus Walker, but for a Chinese-American man, he was tall.

Grandmother’s hair was still black as jet and pulled back into a tight bun. The few silver streaks she did have twinkled in her hair like glitter. She wore wide-leg pajama pants and a loose, layered Mandarin-collared tunic.

“I was just here last week,” I responded.

She always complained that she never saw me enough, even if I had just been there the day before.

“Yes, well, your father never comes to see me anymore.”

“You know, you could go visit him,” I said as I carried the bags of groceries I had hauled upstairs for her into her small kitchen. I placed the bags on the pristine kitchen table. Everything about her apartment was pristine and colorful.

“What do I need to visit for? He should come see me.”

“Grandmother, stop acting so old. You’re not that old. You can go visit him.”

“No, he should come visit me.”

When I was a kid, Mom always talked about moving out of the city, and my dad made that happen when I was in middle school, when we moved to Connecticut, close enough for frequent visits, far enough away that we could enjoy a standard middle-class suburban existence. I think my mom did it just to get away from grandmother.

Once we were in Connecticut, Mom started letting Dad know that when she was ready for them to retire, she wanted to move to Florida. And like the good husband my dad was, he also made that happen.

But what he couldn’t make happen was getting my grandmother out of this apartment. At some point in time, she wasn’t going to be able to make it up to the fourth floor, of course. And at some point, this neighborhood wasn’t going to be friendly or healthy for her. But for now, she was happy.

I let out a sigh, unpacking the groceries and restocking the cupboards. “I’ll be sure to tell him next time I talk to him. You know, you can tell him yourself. There are phones in Florida, you know.” I pointed to the old black rotary dial phone that was mounted on the wall in her kitchen. “That thing still works, doesn’t it?” I teased.

“Well, he can call me too,” she said.

“I’ll be sure to remind him.”

“Let me see what you bought.” She squeezed into the small space, barely big enough for two of us, and began rummaging through the groceries as I tried to put them away.

“Did you get the rice? I needed more rice,” she said, searching through the bags.

One of the bags had been nothing but rice. I was going to have the forearms of a prizefighter from carrying her twenty-pound bag of rice up those stairs. When I was a kid, the bags of rice were bigger. They certainly felt heavier.

When I got the groceries put away, I folded up the bags and stored them under the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I didn’t even make it back to the living room before I collapsed in one of the chairs in the kitchen.

“You seem so tired, Emma. You work too hard. Have you eaten?”

I shook my head.

“Not since breakfast,” I mentioned.

“I’ll make you supper.”

She called every meal ‘supper’. I didn’t think it was a memory thing or a language issue. She just called everything after breakfast “supper”. She always had.

“I could really use a fresh, homemade meal.”

My grandmother was the best cook. Even when she made egg fried rice, it was always the best I had ever had.

“Here, help me. While you sit there, you’re not so tired that you can’t chop an onion.”

She handed me a knife and the cutting board. I grabbed the onion out of the hanging basket and began chopping it into finely diced pieces.

“You want some of that broccoli, too?” I asked.

She nodded as she stirred together a fragrant blend of spices. I could identify the ginger, garlic, and pepper, and then she added more ingredients I no longer knew or cared about. It was all just so wonderful.

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