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.
