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wealth of hearty field hands destined
     to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She
     was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at the sight of our girlish, uncallused hands. Whereas
     our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in
     that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that
     mattered. She would sooner iron a stack of dollar bills than open any of the magazines or newspapers that lined the walls
     of her store. She didn’t know who the president was, much less the central characters in any of her bestselling comic books.
    “I no know the jug head,” she’d say, spit-shining the keys on her cash register.
    “Maybe he come here one day, but I no know it.”
    It was difficult to imagine her raising a child of her own, and chilling to realize that she had. As a baby my father had
     been confined to a grim corner of the newsstand, where he crawled on a carpet of newspapers, teething on nickels. He never
     had a bed, much less his own room, and considered himself lucky when the visitors left and he had the couch to himself. Our
     dog had it better than that.
    “Louie,” she would say, patting the hair on my father’s knuckles, “Louie and the girl.”
    “The girl” was what she called my mother. My parents had been married twelve years, and Ya Ya still couldn’t bring herself
     to call her daughter-in-law by name. My father had made the mistake of marrying an outsider, and it was my mother’s lot to
     suffer the consequences. She had somehow tricked him, sunk in her claws, and dragged him away from his people. It would have
     been all right for him to remain at home for the rest of his life, massaging worry beads and drinking bitter coffee, but to
     marry a woman with two distinct eyebrows was unpardonable.
    “Tell the girl she can sit down now,” Ya Ya would say to my father, pointing to a stool on the far side of the room.
    “Tell the gnome I won’t be staying that long,” my mother would respond. “Her cave’s a little on the dingy side, and I think
     I might have an allergy to her mustache.”
    We would pass the afternoon at Ya Ya’s table, eating stringy boiled meat served with spinach pie. The food tasted as though
     it had been cooked weeks beforehand and left to age in a musty trunk. Her meals had been marinated in something dank and foreign
     and were cooked not in pots and pans, but in the same blackened kettles used by witches. Once we’d been served, she performed
     an epic version of grace. Delivered in both Greek and broken English, it involved tears and excessive hand-wringing and came
     off sounding less like a prayer than a spell.
    “Enough of the chanting,” my mother would say, pushing away her plate. “Tell her I’ll disappear as soon as my kids are fed.”
     More often than not, my mother left the table and waited outside in the car until we had finished our meal.
    “The girl go away now,” Ya Ya would say, raising her glass of ginger ale. “Okay then, we eat.”
    Our visits concluded with an all-you-could-grab assault on the store. “You can each take
one
thing,” my father said. My sisters and I carried bags and pillowcases, clearing the shelves of comic books. We stuffed our
     socks and pockets with candy and popcorn for the twelve-hour ride back home, overpowering the car with the scent of newsprint
     and Ya Ya’s spooky love.
    My mother was pregnant with her sixth child when we received the news that Ya Ya had been hit by a truck. She’d stood wide-eyed
     in the center of the street, staring down an advancing eighteen-wheeler driven by someone bearing a remarkable resemblance
     to my mother. That was the way I pictured it. The truth was considerably less dramatic. It seems she had been bumped by a
     pickup as it