Beyond the Ties of Blood by Florencia Mallon Page B

She had gotten up a fourth time before her husband had finally appeared at the door.
    â€œ Ach , David, another minute and I come get you. You take so long. What is happening to you these days, you take so long?”
    A puzzled glimmer passed through Grandpa’s grey eyes, then he realized he still had his reading glasses on so he took them off, folded them, and tried to put them in his pocket. He missed twice before he finally managed to tuck them in safely. He smiled down at his wife, putting his large arm around her shoulders.
    â€œAh, my soft little peach, you get impatient in your old age.”
    Grandma Myriam relaxed into his arm. When she spoke again, all irritation was gone, replaced by a warm sweetness that matched the cookies she was taking from the oven.
    â€œSuch a charmer. Sit down while I pour your tea.”
    About halfway through his plate of rugelach , when he tried to pick up his mug to wash down a mouthful of sugared cinnamon, Grandpa David’s hand collapsed and the mug fell to the floor, pieces scattering in all directions. Manuel and Grandma looked up in alarm, and Manuel began cleaning up the pieces of the broken cup. A disoriented look in his eyes, Grandpa tried to pick up one of the remaining cookies. But he had lost all function in his right arm. Manuel sat down next to him and handed him the cookie, but Grandpa’s fingers could not close around it. Looking up, Manuel caught Grandma’s gaze and saw his own panic reflected in her eyes.
    Within a month, Grandpa David had taken to his bed, stricken by a mysterious disease that ate away his muscles and turned him into a tiny, wizened fraction of his former self. Though business petered out as people learned of don David’s condition, Grandma insisted on keeping the tailor shop open every day. Except for the stray shirt or jacket that needed mending, which she would then see to herself, she spent her time in the back room, next to the wood-burning stove, stirring simmering soups that wafted rosemary and basil into the shop’s increasingly stale air. Every day, once he got home from school, after drinking his hot, sugared tea with milk and eating the snack his grandma had prepared, Manuel restocked the woodpile next to the stove with small dry logs that kept the fire going. Then, in the late afternoon, rain or shine, he helped Grandma Myriam lug the pots filled with soup and tea out the back door and through the alleyway that connected the shop to the family residence.
    When they reached his grandparents’ living quarters, they entered through a battered wooden door into a narrow passageway. Their footsteps echoed briefly in the dark hall, which quickly opened up onto a spacious, sunny garden planted with geraniums and orange trees. A line of tall doors with shutters bordered the garden along its eastern side, and together they opened the third door from the right. On a sunny day they left it open as they fed Grandpa, because Manuel thought the sunlight might keep the old man from shrinking further down into the furrows of the mattress. He wondered, too, why his mama didn’t come to visit her father. Grandma and Grandpa needed her so much more now, and she never came by. It wasn’t as if she was spending so much time with Papa, who was always at his bakery, anyway.
    Every couple of visits Manuel bent down, putting his hand on Grandpa David’s forehead, the skin so transparent that he could almost see the blood course slowly through the veins. He tried to persuade Grandpa to eat a roll or two by waving a piece in front of his face and holding the bony fingers that peeked out from under the embroidered coverlet, wondering how the capable hands he’d seen darting over seams and collars, tucking and folding in rhythm with the sewing machine, could so quickly have become skeleton’s claws. When Manuel succeeded in feeding his grandpa, even though the old man could no longer talk, a small spark lit up in the