The Deep End by Joy Fielding

with her only tangible link to the past.
    This was the man who had sat with her on rainy afternoons at the cottage and patiently explained the intricacies of gin rummy, who had boiled her perfect five-minute eggs, covering them with little hand-crocheted hats to keep them warm, watching while she ate them, talking to her animatedly about his week in the city, never condescending or patronizing, always exuberant and bursting with life.
    “Linda?” her grandfather asked as Joanne approached his bedside and took his hand in hers, his voice almost a parody of what it had once been.
    “Yes, Pa,” Joanne answered, unconsciously assuming her mother’s voice as she pulled up a chair. “I’m here.” When was the last time he had called her by her rightful name? she wondered. It’s Joanne, she wanted to tell him, but he was already snoring, and Joanne was left clutching his hand through the bars at the side of the bed, wondering whether she would ever get used to being called by her mother’s name.
    “Amazing how they can just drop off like that,” the voice said from somewhere beside her. Joanne looked over at the other bed, where old Sam Hensley was currently sleeping peacefully. “A minute ago,” the woman standing at the foot of the bed continued, “he was a raving lunatic. You should have seen him. He threw a bedpan at the nurse! I don’t know what I’m going to do. If they kick him off this floor, I don’t know where they’ll put him. This is the third home I’ve had to move him to. I’m going out for a cigarette.” She spun around and for the first timesince Joanne had entered the room, she was aware that the woman’s son was also present, leaning his straight-backed wooden chair against the wall, his head resting against his right shoulder, his eyes closed. “Can you believe this?” the woman demanded. “If either one of these sleeping beauties wakes up, tell them I’ve gone down the hail for a cigarette.”
    Joanne watched the woman leave, trying to connect a name to the curious combination of defeated face and defiant strut. They had been introduced about a month ago when the woman’s father had been transferred to this room. Marg something-or-other, Joanne recalled, feeling her grandfather’s hand stir inside her own. Crosby, she remembered with some satisfaction. Marg Crosby and her son, Alan, a boy of about eighteen. Maybe a bit older. Or younger, It was so hard to tell these days, her grandfather would have said.
    “Linda,” her grandfather murmured.
    “Yes, Pa,” Joanne answered, almost by rote, “I’m here.”
    Again, the old man fell quiet. Where are you? Joanne asked him silently. Where do you go? Her eyes moved slowly across his pale, thin face, his cheeks less than half their former size, rough with the leftover stubble of a poor morning shave, administered daily by one of the orderlies. His once wide mouth now puckered inward, and his expansive forehead was completely hidden by the worn-out Sherlock Holmes cap that someone had perched atop his head, a gift from her on his eighty-fifth birthday ten years ago.
    The decade had brought decimation: her grandmother passed away and her grandfather began his retreat; her mother discovered a cancer in her left breast whichspread to every part of her body and ultimately killed her in eighteen months, while her father succumbed to a massive coronary only nine days after they had buried her mother. And now Paul was gone. He had deserted her too.
    “Paul’s left me, Grampa,” she whispered, knowing that he didn’t hear her. “He doesn’t want to be married anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she cried softly as the old man opened his eyes and stared directly into hers, as if he suddenly understood exactly who she was and what she had said. “Grampa?” she asked, seeing a flicker of the man she remembered from her childhood pass across his features.
    His face relaxed into a slow smile. “Do you work here, dear?” he