“Uhnuh,” I say to Elizabeth that morning, asking her to leave out a baby food jar of rice pudding before she goes. I want Marina, my nurse, to know that’s what I’d like for my lunch instead of mashed bananas.

“You want your blanket, Mom?” she asks, already heading to the other part of the mobile home to what used to be her room, to pull the blanket off my bed. She comes back and gives a mock shiver as she unfolds it. “Brrr. It is kind of chilly.” Elizabeth talks to me like I’m her three-year-old who was born around the same time I had my stroke. I don’t remember her name and have tried listening to what Elizabeth calls her so I’ll know, but she only calls her “Mommy’s Little Sweetie Pie,” or sometimes just “Sweetie Pie.” I do remember the name of her eldest, Robby, because he’s named after Robert, her father and my late husband.

“There you go,” she says, tucking the blanket around me in the secondhand armchair she bought after my stroke so I would have something to sit in. When she first bought it I tried telling her it smelled like cat urine, but she kept it and I’ve long since grown used to the smell. “Now you’ll be nice and warm.” She straightens up and looks at her watch. “You need anything else?”

“Uhnuh,” I say, reminding her about the rice pudding.

“Good. Then I’ll see you later. I might have to work late, but Robby’ll be here for you after school.” She leans over and gives me a dry kiss on the forehead and then puts her cheek in close, pressing it against my lips herself—my kiss to her.

I forget for a second that I won’t get my rice pudding and watch as she fixes her hair in the mirror that hangs between the back of the trailer and the front—I suppose it would be the hallway—noticing again how much she looks like both me and Robert. She got her dark skin and eyes from me and her straight hair and tall, thin frame from him.

Elizabeth grabs her supermarket vest and Sweetie Pie before calling back one last good-bye and rushing out the door.

Marina comes a minute after they leave. She’s a nice size girl with a big chest and wide hips and seems to rock our little home from side to side when she moves around it. If I didn’t know any better I would have thought she’d be able to tip it, but Elizabeth had explained to me once during a big storm that turned out to be a mild tornado, the trailer was safe, it was on a sturdy foundation. Elizabeth used to have a nice house before Lewis, her husband, got caught embezzling all that money from his job and had to go to jail. I can imagine what with the legal fees, daycare for Sweetie Pie and paying for a nurse for me, there’s not much left for anything else.

The first thing Marina does when she walks in is take the blanket off me. “Whew! I don’t know how you can stand it in here it’s so hot,” she says, fanning herself and pushing open a window. “Now that’s much better.”

She chatters about this and that as she gives me my pills Elizabeth felt she had to move to the bathroom. They used to sit beside me on a TV tray, but she thought I was taking more than I should have. I don’t know how this could have been possible since I can’t move my arms like I want to. The thought that Robby was taking them never crossed her mind.

I don’t remember how old Robby turned on his last birthday, but I do remember Elizabeth yelling at him when she caught him in front of the television and not doing homework that he’d better pass the seventh grade this year. I don’t like that Robby even though he looks so much like my husband, the resemblance taking my breath away sometimes. I remember pictures of Robert when he was Robby’s age, and they could have been the same person with their wheat-colored hair and light complexion. The only difference is their smile. Robert looked completely happy when he smiled, the happiness traveling up into his blue eyes, but Robby rarely smiles, and when he does it’s more like a smirk, which stops dead on his lips.

He came in one day wearing that smirk of his and I knew right away he was up to no good, watching as he went straight to my medicine tray. Elizabeth was at work and he was supposed to stay with me. He hadn’t, but had gone out to play instead, knowing to get home before his mother did.

“Hey Grandma,” he said as he studied my small collection of pill bottles. He picked up a fat one with a childproof cap Elizabeth and Marina had to struggle with sometimes. He got the cap off and then picked out one of the pale yellow pills. He examined it and then popped it in his mouth and threw his head back and swallowed.

I didn’t know which pill it was, but I knew he shouldn’t have taken it and told him so, “Uhnuh.”

“What’s that Grandma?” he said, not even looking at me, but concentrating on getting another pill out of the container with his finger like he would a pickle in a jar. I think he took about five, swallowing some and chewing others before coming over and leaning down in front of me to show me his tongue, little flecks of yellow still evident around the sides. “All done,” he said, echoing the triumphant words Sweetie Pie shouted when she finished her vegetables after much coaxing.

“Uhnuh,” I said to him later, telling him everything was going to be okay, though I wasn’t so sure it would be. He was on the floor, bent double, moaning and sweating and crying. I saw the helpless look in his eyes, and I got a little scared then, feeling my bladder release, and wishing I could do something for him.

He managed to crawl to the bathroom and I heard him vomit. Elizabeth came home soon after and found him there, dry heaving into the toilet. I think whatever he took was all out of him by then because I heard him say he felt better and he didn’t need to go to the emergency room.

I don’t know why he took those pills. Maybe it was for the attention. I could hear Elizabeth in his room comforting him and bringing him whatever he needed. She didn’t pay much attention to me or Sweetie Pie who was coloring in a stain on the faded brown couch where Robby had spilled soda earlier that day. She had a handful of markers in her fist and moved her arm back and forth vigorously, intent on making the dark stain more colorful.

“Uhnuh,” I said, telling her to stop that before she made things worse and her mother would have to get a new couch. Sweetie Pie froze and then turned to look at me as if she had forgotten I was there. Her eyes got wide and then she dropped the markers and ran out of the room. I’d forgotten I scared her whenever I spoke.

~

Marina sits down on the couch after giving me my pills, and reaches for the blanket she’s taken off me earlier. She puts it across her knees and picks up the remote and turns on the TV. When Robby comes home that afternoon she quickly leaves. Marina doesn’t like him too much either, something to do with how he pretends to be knocked from wall to wall when she’s walking around.

Robby is supposed to give me dinner even though it’s only four o’clock. I like to eat now because my five o’clock medicine puts me to sleep. He comes in with the baby food jars and I hear them pop as he opens them. One is strained peas and the other is dessert—rice pudding. My heart gives a little flutter and I open my mouth, more than ready to eat. I must look like a baby bird waiting for it’s mother to feed it, but I don’t care. I love rice pudding.

Robby pulls up a chair, and sitting in front of me, holds the full spoon above the strained peas jar he’s holding in his left hand. “You want some of this, Grandma?”

“Uhnuh.”

He makes a low humming noise in the back of his throat like an airplane and moves the food close to me, but stops the spoon inches from my mouth. I hate when he does this. “Uhnuh.” I remind him I’m not Sweetie Pie, to stop the games and bring the spoon closer.

“Those guys took my lunch again, Grandma,” he says, talking in that voice he uses to explain to Elizabeth who’s who when they watch those horrible wrestling shows together. The spoon’s still not quite close enough, but if I stick out my tongue I’ll be able to reach it. The signal from my brain to my tongue is slow today and the spoon goes under my nose and back toward Robby by the time I get it out. He puts my food in his own mouth instead. “Too late.”

I don’t say anything because I’m devoting all of my energy to getting that spoon the next time it comes by.

He fills the spoon up again. “Those guys, they’re not that much bigger than me, but there’re four of them.”

Here comes the spoon and I make sure I’m ready for it. I lick at it with the tip of my tongue as it passes, but miss it again.

“Mmm, it is good.”

He does this about a dozen more times, abandoning his story for now to concentrate on flying his airplane. I follow the food with my eyes as he flies it up over my head, around my ears, below my chin. Sweetie Pie got him to stop doing this to her by biting him on the arm. I’d do the same, but I stopped wearing my dentures a long time ago.

He puts down the jar—there’s nothing left of the peas except green streaks around the sides—and picks up the rice pudding. He starts talking again. “Today they took my lunch and made me watch as they flushed it down the toilet. I’m so hungry.”

I watch as he eats the rice pudding; slow at first, testing it, and then shovels it in as if it’s his last meal.

I close my mouth.

Jennifer Gatewood is a twenty-six year old journalism graduate from Temple University. She works for a trade publication and writes short stories in between writing her third novel. She lives in a small town outside of Philadelphia, Pa.