On Grandma’s birthday, Mom and I drive out to the East Bay to take her parents out to lunch. My mom’s sister lives about 20 minutes away from my grandparents, so we meet her at their house. We stop on the way and get a small brightly decorated cake and a bottle of champagne, which I hold as Mom rings the doorbell and Aunt Mary comes to let us in.

I’m behind Mom, balancing the cake in its white cardboard box on the palm of my left hand and gripping the neck of the champagne bottle with my right hand. It’s the same kind of champagne we drank on New Year’s Eve when I was a sophomore in college – wrapped in pink plastic, with little flowers on the label. Aunt Mary gives my shoulders a squeeze; she looks tired.

I walk into the wood-paneled living room with the familiar family photographs hung on the walls. My favorites are the four oval-shaped framed photos of my mom when she was about six, with a turned-out bob and the exact same huge smile she still has, arranged in a diamond above the low L-shaped sofa. Grandma is perching on the arm of the sofa next to small end table.

“Jan!” she says, happy to see her youngest child. Then she sees me. “Oh, and Mackenzie too. What a nice surprise.”

Mom’s smile freezes a little and her eyebrows twitch down. It wasn’t meant to be a surprise. She told Grandma I was coming; I’ve been planning to come for a few weeks now. Partly because they are getting older and I want to spend time with them while I can, and partly because I’m out of work and done applying to grad school and bored. I decide not to correct her. Behind me Aunt Mary giggles a little.

My grandpa doesn’t get up from his easy chair in the far corner of the room. He doesn’t even smile; he just nods at us then looks back down at his hands in his lap. Mom leans down and kisses the leathery skin on his cheek. He reaches up to squeeze her hand but misses, his hand grasping empty air. He is ninety now. Above his chair is a photo of the whole family from my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, a little more than ten years ago. That same day my grandpa was showing off by doing pushups with the grandkids on his back. He started with the youngest and worked all the way up to a couple of pushups with my oldest cousin Vince sitting on his back. Now just a few minutes of conversation tires him, and it seems like he’s always sitting at the edge of the room halfway asleep. I force my smile even wider and hold out the champagne and cake to my grandma.

“Oh, what is this for?” she asks.

“For you, grandma. Happy birthday,” I say.

“Oh, it’s my birthday,” she says. I nod, unsure if I should be amused or unsettled at this. She is still smiling, her bright lips stretched against her pale white skin. I can’t remember a time when her eyebrows weren’t completely drawn on.

My mom takes the cake and champagne from me. “I’m going to put these in your fridge for later, okay Mom? Something for you two to celebrate with tonight.” In the doorway at the other end of the room, between the living room and the hallway into the bright yellow kitchen, Mom turns around and raises her eyebrows at me and presses her lips together. She glances past me at her sister, who laughs again. She rolls her eyes then disappears into the kitchen.

“So Mom, where do you want to go to lunch?” my aunt says.

“Oh, you know,” Grandma says. She holds up her right hand and turns it in little circles like she’s trying to remember something. Around and around and around in the air, the right words always just out of reach.