Matched

It’s expected. It’s fair. I remind myself of this as we climb into the elevator to go to his apartment. “You can push the button,” I tel Bram, trying to joke with him. Bram and I used to fight over who got to push the buttons when we came to visit. Bram smiles and presses the 10. For the last time, I think to myself. After today, there wil be no Grandfather to visit. We wil have no reason to come back.

Most people don’t know their grandparents this wel . The kind of relationship I have with my other grandparents in the Farmlands is much more common. We communicate via port every few months and visit every few years. Many grandchildren watch the Final Banquet on the portscreens, too, one step removed from what’s happening. I have never envied those other children; I’ve pitied them. Even today, I feel that way.

“How long do we have before the Committee shows up?” Bram asks my father.

“About half an hour,” my father answers. “Does everyone have their gifts?”

We nod. Each of us has brought something to give Grandfather. I’m not sure what my parents chose for him, but I know Bram went to the Arboretum to get a rock from a spot as near to the Hil as possible.

Bram catches me looking at him, and he opens his palm to show me the rock again. It is round and brown and stil a bit dirty. It looks a little like an egg, and when he brought it back yesterday, he told me that he’d found it under a tree in a pile of soft green pine needles that looked like a nest.

“He’s going to love it,” I say to Bram.

“He’l love your gift, too.” Bram closes his fist around the rock again. The doors slide open and we step out into the hal .

I’ve made Grandfather a letter for my gift. I got up early this morning and spent time cutting and pasting and copying sentiments on the letter-making program on the port. Before I printed the letter, I found a poem from the decade in which he was born and included it as wel . Not many people care about poetry after they finish school, but Grandfather always has. He’s read al of the Hundred Poems many times.

One of the doors along the hal opens and an old woman peeks her head out. “You’re going to the Banquet for Mr. Reyes?” she asks, and she doesn’t even wait for us to answer. “It’s private, isn’t it?”

“It is,” my father says, stopping politely to speak with her, even though I know he is eager to see his father. He can’t keep himself from glancing down the hal at Grandfather’s closed door.

The woman grumbles a little. “I wish it were public. I’d like to go so I can get ideas. Mine’s in less than two months. You can bet it’s going to be public.” She laughs a little, a short, harsh sound, and then she asks, “Can you come and tel me about it afterward?”

My mother comes to the rescue, as she and my father always do for each other. “Perhaps,” Mama says, smiling, and she takes my father’s hand and turns her back on the woman.

We hear a disappointed sigh and then a click behind us as the woman closes her door. The nameplate on her door says Mrs. Nash, and I remember that Grandpa has talked about her before. Nosy, he said.

“Can’t she wait for her own turn to come, instead of talking about it on Grandfather’s day?” Bram mutters, pushing open the door to Grandfather’s residence.

It already feels like a different place. More hushed. A little lonelier. I think that is because Grandfather is not sitting at the window anymore. Today, he rests in a bed in the living room as his body shuts down. Right on time.

“Could you move me over to the window?” Grandfather asks, after saying hel o to al of us.

“Certainly.” My father reaches for the edge of the bed and pul s it smoothly toward the early morning light. “Remember when you did this for me?

When I had al those inoculations as a child?”

Grandfather smiles. “That was a different house.”

“And a different view,” my father agrees. “Al I could see from that window was the neighbor’s yard and an air-train track if I looked high enough.”

“But beyond that there was sky,” Grandfather says softly. “You can almost always see the sky. And what’s beyond that, I wonder? And after this?”

Bram and I exchange glances. Grandfather must be wandering a little today, which is to be expected. On the day the elderly turn eighty, the decline always accelerates. Not everyone dies at exactly the same time, but it is always before midnight.

“I’ve invited my friends to come immediately after the Committee visits,” Grandfather says. “And then after they leave I’d like to spend some one-on-one time with each of you. Starting with you, Abran.”

My father nods. “Of course.”

The Committee does not take long. They arrive, three men and three women in their long white lab coats, and they bring things with them, too. The Banquet clothes that Grandfather wil wear. Equipment for tissue preservation. A microcard with a history of his life so he can watch it on the port.

With the exception of maybe the microcard, I think Grandfather wil like our gifts better.