Our grandmother sat in the corner, an irish-plaid towel hung over her legs, in a wheel chair, drinking two litre bottles of apple juice and orange juice, the little droplets hanging off her chin, her head tilted back. She said as a little girl, she would always try to get as much vitamin c as possible if she felt herself getting sick. Now she just drowned herself in the stuff. We kept telling her orange juice is not a viable cure for cancer, so she started drinking apple juice too.
She got diagnosed with cancer a few days after our grandfather died. They say couples always pass within a few months of each other. My grandmother hated my grandfather, so her vigorous orange and apple juice guzzling was really an ambition of divorcing his name from her in death; she didn’t care whether she passed or kept on living another hundred years, so long as no one associated her death with his.
As I left I locked up, remembering to leave my key in the door for Rooty (whenever he got home). We could only afford one key, and couldn’t afford a doormat to leave it under.
I told grandma if she just went two days without buying lotto tickets, we could get another key. She says it’s just her luck that one of those days would be the day her ticket goes to someone else. I didn’t see it mattered, she was gonna die any day now anyway. She wants to win so bad I often think if she did win, she’d die right there on the spot, her life’s greatest ambition crossed off the last line of her to-do list, and being too dead to claim it would be forced to forfeit the prize leaving us here alone with one key, a cellar full of juice and still no doormat.