Sometimes I would tiptoe into the kitchen for a soda, and I could hear the desperation creeping out of his voice, the stretch of silence that followed when the people on the other end explained why Thursday wasn’t good and Tuesday not much better, and then Gramps’s heavy sigh after he had hung up the phone, his hands fumbling through the files in his lap like those of a cardplayer who’s deep in the hole. Eventually, a few people would relent, the pain would pass, and Gramps would wander into my room to tell me stories of his youth or the new joke he had read in Reader’s Digest.
