Dad shook his head.
“And I kept telling him to stop letting a grown woman climb all over him like she was still eight.”
For the first time that night, I laughed.
Then I immediately started crying.
Grandpa reached out.
I hesitated before hugging him carefully.
“So why did you ask me to sleep beside you?”
His expression changed again.
He opened the album to another photograph.
Grandma Rose was sitting beside his hospital bed.
“She was twenty-six when that was taken,” he said. “I had an accident at work. Nothing like tomorrow, but I was terrified.”
He ran his finger over the old picture.
“She stayed awake beside me all night.”
Grandpa looked toward the telescope.
“And tomorrow morning I have to go into that hospital without her for the first time.”
Suddenly everything made sense.
“I didn’t want you in my bed,” he said with a small laugh. “I prepared that bed for you.”
He pointed toward the smaller one across the room.
“I just didn’t want to spend the last night before surgery alone.”
Dad looked away.
His eyes were red.
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
Grandpa smiled at him.
“Because you would spend the entire night checking my blood pressure and telling me to sleep.”
Despite everything, Dad laughed.
Then Grandpa turned to me.
“And because tonight there’s supposed to be a meteor shower.”
I looked at the telescope.
“You remembered?”
When I was a little girl, Grandpa had promised that someday we would stay awake all night and watch shooting stars together.
We had never done it.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years,” he said.
That night Dad stayed too.
He took the sofa in the next room while Grandpa and I lay on separate beds beside the window.
Around two in the morning, Grandpa whispered:
“Emily?”
“Yeah?”
“Still awake?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A few minutes later, the first streak of light crossed the sky.
Then another.
Then dozens.
I ran to the telescope.
“Grandpa! Come look!”
But when I turned around, he wasn’t watching the sky.
He was watching me.
