Abuelo’s waiting for me at the Nashua bus stop in his old black Mustang. His midlife crisis car, Dad jokes, even though he’s the one who bought it all those years ago for Abuelo to fix up. It’s May, but Abuelo’s wearing a big brown coat, oversized aviators, and a top hat with a buckle. He looks like a pilgrim. Or the Terminator.

As I approach the car, Abuelo’s lips purse but don’t quite smile. Then they explode.

“¡Ángelito!” he shouts. "¡Mi Socio!”

“You look like you came off the Mayflower with that hat,” I tell him, tossing my backpack in the backseat.

“You look like a comunista with that beard,” he shoots back. “And an ugly one.”

“It’s not a beard,” I laugh. “I just haven’t shaved in like three days.”

“Ahh. In that case, it’s time to shave, cabrón.” He gives me a playful shove.

“I haven’t seen you drive the Mustang in years.”

“I haven’t, much.” He shrugs. “Not since Selena died.”

This is how Abuelo is. He effaces you one second then demands every ounce of your empathy the next.

“Why not?” I ask, buckling my seatbelt.

“I didn’t want to parade around, act like I wasn’t in mourning. But I don’t have a lot of time left, and I’m not going to spend it in the Toyota.”

I hum my agreement. “How are you? Really?”

He pauses, guiding us slowly to a stop. “Ready,” he says, chewing on his lip.

“You aren’t afraid?”

“Of course I am,” he says, tapping the wheel as we wait at the light. “Todos tienen su final,” he adds.

Everyone has their last act. This has been Abuelo’s line the past few years, as his immigrant generation died off around him. And he’s right. Tio Elio, his brother-in-law, was the last to go. Elio had brutal, multi-decade dementia. The kind that stops you from speaking. I can’t remember his voice, only how he used to laugh with Abuelo when we visited him in the nursing home. Abuelo went every single day, cracking jokes and telling Elio stories. And then Elio’s heart gave out last spring.

“Todos tienen su final,” I repeat.

“Alli está,” Abuelo says as the light flips green. There it is.

“What if you live?” I can’t wrap my head around a world without him. Abuelo’s my last living grandparent—our family’s last viejo, our last real touchstone to the past. To Cuba.

“Mierda,” he says. Shit. “I don’t know what your dad told you, but I’m dying, buddy. And it’s time.”

I hum and turn back to the road. Abuelo drives like a pro; the pine trees whisper as we quickly pass.

“We have to live with what comes,” he adds. “Including the pain.”

“I’m not afraid, Abuelo,” I tell him, my voice steady. “It will hurt, but I’m not afraid.”

“I know you’re not, Ángelito.” He nods at the road ahead. “Ánimo y adelante,” he adds. Courage and onward. Abuela’s old motto.

I can’t tell if he truly understands me, but there’s nothing more to say. We hover home, gliding, weightless. Past the supermarket, past the lumberyard, past the cheap Chinese place and right into his driveway. The old house looks beautiful, tiny and unchanged, faded yellow paint glowing in the afternoon sun. It comforts me to see it.

“I know you don’t like steak, you little comunista, so I got some nice haddock,” Abuelo says. “We’re going to eat like kings. I’m eating whatever I want, from now on.”

“Thank you, Abuelo. I’m eating meat again, though.”

“¿De verdad? Since when?”

“Last semester. I figured I had bigger problems.”

“Good.” He folds his sunglasses. “That vegetarian shit never made sense, mijo.”

“It does.” We’ve had this argument so many times. But it’s pointless to tell an immigrant like Abuelo, an old pro baseball player still excited by the bounty in an American grocery store, that he, or anyone, should restrict their diet. “But let’s not fight about it anymore.”

“To save the planet?” He shoots me a sour look. “That’s just a cuento, Ángel.”

“Everything’s a cuento,” I mumble, but Abuelo isn’t listening.

“You go back to before the time of men—there were dinosaur cows walking around, dumping methane everywhere. They took shits that covered the whole island.” Abuelo cackles.

“What the hell are you talking about, viejo?” I give him a shove. “What island? We’re in New Hampshire, coño. Every cow we eat here comes from Texas.”

“Comemierda.” He grins. Shiteater. Then his face settles into that familiar, political anger. “The comunistas will tell you that right as they eat the steak off your plate.”

“Okay, okay,” I hold out my palms. “Give it a rest.”

“I need to tell you, mijo, I need you to know. The ones with the big brains and great speeches, the ones who talk about all of us, together. That’s who you can’t trust.”

Abuelo lectures on meat-stealing communists like he’s been waiting for the chance. He probably has. But my attention drifts, assaulted by Pine-Sol and nostalgia. The walls still bloom with Abuela’s décor, nearly three years after she died. Even the magazines are the same. Abuelo doesn’t read them, but he can’t bear to throw them out.

He takes extra care with the cleaning, polishing everything with heartbreaking, Sisyphean determination. Chores are cathartic for Abuelo. Before and after baseball he worked with his hands, double shifts in factories and auto shops. Now, at eighty-three, he can’t work the way he wants to, but he’ll always find something to deep clean or reassemble, tirelessly reconstructing the haven Abuela built.

There’s just one change, the absence of Charlie, their old, deaf, incontinent beagle. At the end, Charlie couldn’t even hear his own name, so Abuelo tied a bell to his collar to track him in the house. Putting him to sleep would have been merciful. Just. But we were afraid to leave Abuelo alone, so we let Charlie dither on, diapered and delirious, limping around and jingling.

Then in April, Abuelo decided enough was enough. He put Charlie down himself.

I was cutting class when I got the news. I heard my phone and read the text and realized that every minute, everywhere on earth, people learned of death from that same chipper ding.

“¡Coño, atención!”Abuelo waves his arms, waking me from my daydream. He’s describing conditions under Franco, as if he were there. The man makes his own transitions.

He cracks two Heineken bottles and exaggerates a cheesy, grateful moan. “Salud, mijo,” he toasts. “To your studies and adventures in the greatest country on earth.”

We clink and sip. He’s proud of that last, Fox-Newsy touch.

“So, what have you been learning?”

“A ton, Abuelo. I really like my philosophy classes.”

“What kind of philosophy?” He frowns. “No Marx, right?”

“No, viejo. I’m interested in existentialism. What our lives mean, that sort of thing.”

“¿Qué?” He grins. “Nobody can teach you that, mijo.”

“No, but they teach us how to reason. How philosophers arrive at their conclusions.”

“And what are the conclusions?”

“Bueno,” I decide to go right for it. “Like you said, no one can teach us what our lives mean. We have theories and religions, we have cuentos to believe in, but we can’t prove them. We just exist, without a reason. So we're free to choose our own reasons, but we can’t know.”

After a pause, Abuelo scoffs. “Que basura, bobo.”

I blush. Months of obsession, reduced to a single label. Basura. Trash.

So I hit back. “Are you in pain?” I ask, pointing at his sides and instantly regretting it.

He winces, reflexively looking away. “A little, but I’m okay.” I’ve seen this face a million times. It’s how Abuelo faces unfortunate, circle-of-life truths. Friends growing frail. Grandkids moving away. Every September, when his teams miss the playoffs.

He has a bit of agency left, I think—until my dad and his generation swoop in, calling the shots amongst the monitors and IV bags. That’s how it’s gone with all the viejos.

It was the hardest part of losing Abuela. Seeing my radiant, guerilla grandmother, brittle and powerless. Wheeled from one false hope treatment to another, so my dad and aunt and uncles—so all of us—could say we did what we could. Seeing Abuelo preside in the background, solemn and priestlike, nodding loose agreement to our hushed translations.

“I’m glad you came, Ángel,” Abuelo says. “It’s been quiet, without Charlie.”

“I noticed. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. I was up at school.”

“I know, mijo. And I’m sorry. But it’s best not to make a big parade about goodbyes.”

“¿De verdad? Do you believe that?”

“Sí. You can’t stop people’s pain. But you can prevent them from seeing death directly.”

“And you think that’s good?”

“I do.” He laughs. “Take it from a viejo with a lot of dead friends. It hurts to lose the people we love. But it hurts more to see them fading and know you can’t help.”

“We’re still talking about Charlie?”

“We’re talking about everyone.” He shrugs. “But Charlie’s death hurt your dad a lot. He cried and cried when we threw out Charlie’s bed.”

“My Dad? I can’t picture it.”

“Sí. He knows it will be his turn soon enough.”

I swallow, not sure if he’s talking about Vincent, our ancient golden retriever, or himself. “And you’re talking about . . .”

“The dog, coño,” Abuelo grins, shaking his head. “Well, who knows? But how’s that Vincent doing?”

“Málito.” I grimace. “I still can’t imagine my dad crying like that. Usually he only cries in a cheesy way. Watching a sports movie or something.”

Abuelo laughs. “Don’t let him fool you. That narizón could never hold his tears in. Even in the barrio where he had his little gang, he’d cry at the first sign of real trouble.”

“¿De verdad?”

“Yeah. Your dad’s a tough son of a bitch, but Selena raised him to show emotion. I didn’t raise any wimps, but men are supposed to show emotion.” He takes a sip. “Oye – your Spanish is getting much better, mijo.”

I smile. “I took a Spanish lit class, I got a lot of practice.”

“It’s good. Better. But you still can’t roll your Rs. Repeat after me: erre con erre . . .”

He knows I’ll stumble through these pronunciation drills. Abuelo always finds our faults, proves his expertise. It’s a lasting affectation from his barrio childhood, when everything was a measuring contest. Lately his lessons—from flossing your teeth to throwing a right hook—have grown more frequent. I try to hide my frustration.

“Did I ever tell you about the bullfight I saw when I was playing in Mexico?” Abuelo asks.

A million times. But I say no, dime, and that’s enough to start Abuelo sputtering, laughing about the party that night where the winning Matador danced naked, and how he was so hungover the next afternoon he couldn’t throw a strike.

Quickly we’re rolling, sipping Heinekens and sliding through old stories from Abuelo’s ballplayer past. This is the world he lives in, a world of memories. And when he starts, he goes for hours, detailing mostly true, miscreant misadventures on different continents. These days, no one’s around to verify the ones we haven’t heard before or committed to memory. But Abuela and the other viejos used to back up even his most incredible stories. “Watch out, you put a nickel in him,” she used to say. I can still hear her voice croaking in my head.

My role here is simply to listen and hype him up. I’m beside his bad ear, so I just nod, smile, provide enough eye contact and head shakes and ¿de verdads? to keep him rolling, retrieving the past. “Sí, really, Juanito said that,” he’ll beam, thrilled to have surprised me.

This love for his cuentos is part of our bond. My cousins don’t soak up all the details. Our parents distract him with too many questions. “You’re my Goldilocks,” he told me once.

Together, these stories coalesce into the narrative that defines our family history. There aren’t many photos of our life before the States; when we left Cuba, they were confiscated, along with everything else we had. We were deemed gusanos—worms, traitors to the revolution, enemies of the state. We were giving up, in the eyes of the regime. We didn’t get to keep our memories. Abuelo’s Tia Cuca smuggled a few polaroids, stitching them into the lining of her bra. There’s a few more of Abuelo in his old White Sox uniform that Dad dug up. But for the most part, Cuba, and life before 1965, exists for us in memory, in the stories and espresso swirling around this tiny kitchen.

Abuela faithfully photographed everything since. Factory uniforms, citizenship oaths, thrifty Christmases and thin winter coats. Growing up, I spent my Sundays studying her albums. Learning the narrative, learning who we were.

Abuelo asks if I remember the band at my parents’ wedding.

“Of course not,” I blink. He laughs, remembering, then stands to clear the bottles and start on the meal. Abuelo’s a fire department regular, so I linger by the stove. Years after Abuela passed, the kitchen remains a mystery to him. Every few weeks, he’ll leave a pan on the stove or a dish in the oven. Twice, he’s microwaved plantains until they burst into flame.

We eat. The fish and beer feel good together. Halfway through, I catch him staring.

I meet his gaze. “How are you feeling about the treatments?”

Abuelo snorts. “That’s for you all, not for me, Ángel.”

I try to think of something to say. “I’m sorry, viejo,” is the best I can do.

“In the car, you asked if I was afraid. I’m not afraid to die. I’m not afraid of pain. But I’m afraid for the things of memory. All these cuentos . . . all these people . . . what if I’m the last to remember them?”

“Those memories, Abuelo. Did they ever really exist?”

He squints. “Sí, Ángel.”

“Do they exist now?”

“Sí, coño!” Abuelo's voice sharpens. “These things happened. These people lived.”

I pry from another angle. “Why does it matter?”

His face is sour. “What do you mean, why does it matter?”

“Follow me. Your friend Juanito is dead, right?”

“Sí, he fell in the sugar centrifuge, remember?” He scowls, offended that I forgot.

“¿De verdad? I didn’t realize that was the same Juanito.”

“Sí, of course.” He scoffs. “The other Juanito’s a fucking cabrón.”

I laugh. “Okay. Juanito is dead. Do you think when you die, he’ll be more dead?”

Abuelo looks me up and down. “No, hijo. But what type of mierda is that? Things happen in life that are bigger than the physical body. Legado. You know this word? Legado?”

“Sí, legacy,” I say in English. “We have the same word. But that’s just another cuento, Abuelo. The stories we tell ourselves, they change. They aren’t permanent, they don’t freeze in amber. And we tell them to distract ourselves, from our lives and from the fact that we exist.”

Abuelo strokes his chin. It feels good, to explain to him. To anyone, out loud.

I go on. “From the fact that we exist, and that someday, we won’t. We’ll die.”

“Coño.” There’s a gentle spark in Abuelo’s eye. “This is what they teach you?”

“A bit. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.”

“At school? I thought you were just partying.”

“Not really,” I say softly. “That’s what my dad says?”

“Más o menos.” He shrugs. Then he clicks his tongue and smiles. “So instead, you sit around thinking about death?”

“Not entirely.” I laugh. “But sí. Reading about this. Talking about this.”

“Talking with who?” Abuelo leans forward, attentive.

I smile. “A woman, of course.”

“Allí está.” He beams and leans back. “Como se llama?”

“Kate."

“Kate.” He nods. "The same one from the winter?”

“Sí.” I smile. “We spent a lot more time together, this semester.”

“Coño, mijo.” He slaps the table. “You’re in love!”

“Sí, Abuelo.” I should be proud, it should be simple enough to say, but in my gut there’s a rush of elementary school embarrassment.

“Allí está. And she believes in this mierda about death and nothingness?”

“Si. Más o menos,” I smirk. “We read the same stuff. She’s brilliant, Abuelo.”

“And she’s pretty?” he leans in even farther.

“Sí. She is,” I say. “Bellisima.”

“And . . .” Abuelo’s face narrows in recognition. “Why do you say it with sadness?”

“It’s complicated.” I gulp. “She lives in Chicago now. She’s older, she already finished school.”

Abuelo nods. “It always is, with good women. But are you going to see her?”

“I am. I need to figure it out, but I think next month.”

“Go chase her, mijo. Chicago in the summer—” He flings his head and howls at the ceiling.

“I will,” I laugh and nod. “I will.”

“Bueno, el asunto es,” he pauses. The point is. “That shit’s a circle, mijo. Your idea doesn’t change anything. So you exist? You’re free? You’re right here, aren’t you? You need all those fancy books to believe it?”

I shrug. If he’s right, I don’t want to hear it. So I stand to clear our plates, itching to smoke a bogue. My habit got worse with Kate; we consumed cigarettes like water. But I’m not looking to catch a lecture; Cubans give brutal scoldings. When my uncle came home drunk once, in high school, Abuela and her mother sat him down for a tag-team verbal beatdown, berating him until sunrise and slapping him awake when he’d start to nod off.

These aren’t even my memories. But here, in the house where they took place, these stories are intractable, baked into the floorboards and the furniture around us. They’re a part of me, the canon of my life. I let them coat my mind as Abuelo leans on the counter beside me, pausing periodically to criticize how I wash the dishes. As the last viejo, his presence is towering. But soon, I realize, all these stories will be ours to retell or let slip away.

I slip back into Abuelo’s stream of consciousness. He’s walking side by side with Abuela as she bikes slowly through the street. She won’t laugh at his jokes, but she smiles and pedals playfully, and he knows she’s into him.

“She barely laughed, our whole life together.” He smiles and closes his eyes. “I could make anyone laugh, except for her.”

“Is that why you loved her?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I just loved her.”

We stand in rhythmic silence. I am tethered to him, filled with empathy.

“A dormir,” he barks. Bedtime. For him, this means a café con leche, a long shower, and a few hours fielding calls from our Miami relatives with a game or a cowboy movie on. We sip the café fast, silent, standing. Then, Abuelo pops the PM cap off his pill organizer, downs the contents, and leaves to shower. I shower too, with a beer, and plop on the couch, bloated, scrolling through Instagram.

An hour later he greets me in crisp, pinstriped pajamas with a spring in his step.

“You take the bed,” he says in English. “I take the couch.”

This is another ritual we play at each time I’m here. There’s a guest room upstairs, but Abuelo claims the laundry’s too much of a challenge. Really, he just hates sleeping in the bed alone.

“De ninguna manera,” I say. No way. “You’re eighty-three years old and you’re dying.”

The last word slips and hangs in the air. But Abuelo’s unfazed.

“No, you take the bed. I like the couch. It’s cold.”

“De ninguna manera,” I say, with more clarity. “You’re eighty-three, viejo.”

“The couch reminds me less of Selena.” He winces. “Sometimes I sleep there anyways.”

This, sadly, I know. “Sorry. I can’t let you.” It’s our rule. I’m not sure why I follow it.

“What if you sleep with me? We’ll set up the pillows between us.”

“Okay, mi socio.” I squeeze his arm; he’s still so strong.

Abuelo smiles and steps away, swinging his arm to follow him into the blaring commentary of the game. “The Yankees don’t have it this year,” he climbs into bed.

“It’s only May, Abuelo,” I say, wondering if he’ll survive the season. “There’s time.”

“Doesn’t matter. Look at them, they stand at the plate afraid to swing.”

Just then the corded phone rings on the bedside table.

“¿Quien habla?” Abuelo demands. “Jorge who?” After a second he smiles wide and switches back to Spanish. “Ah, I know you! You’re my cousin Jorge! How the hell are you?”

I stop following and melt into the bed, entombed by the stories and the beer. Sometime later, I wake up itchy to Abuelo’s face sagging in the blue light and boredom of the ninth inning. We’re losing; the players’ expressions are passive, mechanical. Desert-like. Devoid.

“You might be right about this team, viejo,” I tell him.

“Coño,” he grumbles. “I thought you were asleep.”

“Just for a minute.” I yawn. “It’s not over yet, I guess.”

“It’s okay, Ángelito,” he chuckles. Everything is bathed in the TV glare: his gold-rimmed glasses, the deep, wrinkly cleft of his chin, his thick white hair. “I’ve seen a lot of wins in my life. I don’t need many more.”

Reality pulls through my gut, hot and painful. We will lose him, he will die. I want to reach out and touch his arm and tell him I love him and I could never be ready for him to go; I want to scream into the pillow and explode in agony. But I can’t. He doesn’t need it and neither do I. He’s going to die. He’s going to die, and it’s all just so random and scientific that it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing does, and it all hurts so much.

Abuelo sits still, stoic and upright against the headboard. A few pitches later, the last Yankee pops out.

“A dormir.” Abuelo yawns, lifting his arm to turn off the TV. “In the morning, pancakes.”

The night light glows behind me. Abuelo shifts and his breath swims into a wheezy dry snore. I’ve missed it, the hum of his lungs.

“Abuelo,” I start, but he’s peacefully asleep.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to follow him.