The Sixteenth of June Read Online Free PDF Page A

the spring issue of the alumni magazine sit untouched. Who needed to see the news trumpeted of more nuptials and neurologists? Their degrees trailed behind them like shoes from a rear bumper. Gone was the playful sense that their activities might be abandoned for more hip pursuits. Paul Yu & Co. were in it for good.
    â€œYou are almost thirty now,” his grandmother had observed on Tuesday. She said it wistfully, and Stephen felt caught between the troubling possibilities that she was either reminding herself of this fact, to ground the balloon of her wandering mind, or was reminding him. And so he had held his tongue rather than reply—as he normally would—that he knew his own age perfectly well. He nodded in polite agreement, as he did that whole afternoon.
    He shifts his umbrella to the other hand. Gone now.
    Just days ago he had stood in her room. Days, hours. How many minutes had it been?
    Standing by her bed, he had felt paralyzed, unsure if he should attempt a final good-bye. Would it offend her? Would it diminish her chances? So he had remained mute, not realizing he would regret what he didn’t say more than what he did.
    She had likely taken his reticence as a sign that the end was near. Michael and June visited that same evening, and he imagines them standing by her bed with bowed heads, deferential at last. In death, you were a victor.
    Then there was the place itself. Pine Grove. They probably all have similar names. Shady Oaks. Cypress Point. Maple Valley. Nursing homes and country clubs like to affiliate with trees. But there was a dignity there, the kind of hushed reverence he normally associates with libraries and museums.
    â€œNot too shabby, eh?” Grandma Portman had prodded, watching him take it in when he first visited. It was the week after 9/11. He had decided to check on her after learning that his parents had no intention of visiting.
    He lent his grandmother his elbow as they strolled the grounds. He had been expecting a dilapidated building that smelled of antiseptic, threadbare common rooms emanating despair, but this was more like college, with its sprawling campus and tennis courts. They stood together on the crest of a gently sloping hill. “It was good of you to come, bubeleh ,” she said, squeezing his arm. They gazed at the weeping willows, the IN MEMORIAM benches beneath. Stephen, touched by how pleased she was to see him, felt bizarrely close to tears.
    â€œGod, it’s so scary,” Nora had said of the attacks. “I was worried my mom’s chemo would get disrupted, with all the chaos at the hospitals.”
    â€œRight,” he replied awkwardly. Nora had tunnel vision. Not even those towers could get her to look up from her mother’s sickbed.
    It occurred to him, standing on that hill, that he hadn’t confided in Nora in weeks. He had fallen into the role of listener. He didn’t fault her for being preoccupied with her mother, but selfishly, he missed her. She was becoming less available to him as a friend, and he sensed her fading in some way he couldn’t pinpoint.
    Meanwhile, his grandmother seemed so delighted to have him there. He remembered her as being stern when he was a boy, but any trace of severity had vanished from her face, softened by age. And then there was the matter of the new head bob.
    It was probably involuntary, some sort of neuromuscular twitch. Her head went like a basketball at times: nod nod nod. It must have been uncomfortable, but she said nothing of it. Stephen had come to see her, and that was all that mattered, yes? Her head bounced along in agreement, all the repressed affirmations from a lifetime released at the mere sight of him.
    So he walked with her, dutifully following her. Down the hall, through a glass atrium, the corridors drenched in light. He felt a strange sense of familiarity, as though in a dream.
    His plan for that visit had been to make a quick escape. He would make sure she was