It’s a foggy, disorientating spring morning when my late grandfather pulls up to the drive-thru window. The nearest stoplight flashes from yellow to red, and beyond his Buick’s back bumper, the traffic piles up on the main road, dozens of taillights casting halos into the clouded air. There he is, that signature notch in his rounded nose, fishing an American Express card out of his fanny pack. He lets out a guffaw, one of those sparkling barks of laughter he once reserved for playoff hockey and The Andy Griffith Show. “Lemme tell you something,” he says, “You ready?”
I take his card, so absently I almost drop it, and keep my attention fixed on him.
“My parents were broke when I was a kid. I told myself when I grew up, if I ever felt like buying something, instead of making it, I would. Today’s that day, kid. I left the grounds dry as a bone in the basket. Guess I didn’t feel like pressing that button.”
I gaze at his open face, at the silver stubble dotting his chin, the flare of his ears, the Toronto Maple Leafs logo stitched into his baseball cap. There’s that glint in his eye–the same flicker of mischief he’d flash before snatching a bite of my bagel–it’s him. He always did skip the niceties, launching into a tale of his tire blowing on the highway, or how the Leafs needed a better goalie, whether he was talking to his wife or the waiter bringing his tuna salad.
“I guess not.” When I study the card he’s handed me, I’m half-expecting to see my grandfather’s name on the bottom, George M. Andonov. Instead there’s an unfamiliar collection of letters scratched across the shiny plastic. “What do you do?”
“I’m retired now, kid. But I did a lot of different things–for a while, I operated my own corner store. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah.” My grandfather was retired for most of the time we were both alive, but I remember him talking about the corner store he owned in downtown Toronto, how he could never order enough butter tarts. I almost ask if he recognizes me, but the question is too absurd to voice aloud–if he knew who I was, the recognition would’ve shown on his face.
So instead I read his order back to him. “Tall coffee, with cream and two sugars?”
“That’s the one. Should I branch out next time?”
“You could. We make a lot of fancy drinks.” I hang on to the possibility he might return, recalling a dozen trips to Tim Hortons when I was young, how my grandfather would order a double-double, a drip coffee with two creams and two sugars. This man couldn’t possibly be the same one who’d order me buttery, blueberry bagels from Tim Hortons, who’d shout, “Did you fall in?” to whomever had been in the bathroom more than a few minutes, who’d suffered a heart attack last summer while his wife was at the grocery store, buying oranges and milk. And yet.
I remember the last words he said to me, as my visit last summer came to a close, and he was hauling my suitcase out of his car trunk. “My door’s always open for you, kid,” he said, placing the suitcase at my feet, grasping my shoulder, serious for just a second or two, like he knew I was running from something.
I should have told him–during our last dinner together, while we were eating zelnik and carrot cake, or watching hockey that evening. I should’ve asked his advice. Let him help.
“Maybe next time I’ll be adventurous. I’ll try just about anything, so long as it’s sweet,” says the man in the drive-thru, “We got enough bitterness in this world without drinking it. So. Is this a good gig?”
“My job?” I pick up his steaming cup of coffee, adding the two sugars, a generous splash of cream, a lid and a cardboard sleeve. I hesitate, not wanting to cut the conversation short. “It’s okay.” To be honest, I dread most work days, driving to work in the dark, the whip of cold air each time the window opens, the achy burn on the back of my hand from a sloshing cup of chamomile. “You from Colorado?”
“No, no.” He shakes his head. “I was born north of the border, but you all boast about your three-hundred days of sunshine–the hell’s with the fog, by the way? Anyway, I had to see what all that was about.”
North of the border
. “Here’s this. Before it gets cold.” I hand him the cup, feel the invisible string tethering us to one another snap as he takes it.
He pops off the lid, inspects the steaming liquid, and nods, before snapping the lid snugly back into place. “You didn’t skimp on the cream, kid. Good on you.” As he pulls away, the fog gathers behind his bumper and smothers him.

My late grandfather appears in the drive-thru right around seven in the morning, every morning, for the next four days. Everyday it’s foggy and cold, anomalous for Denver. I volunteer to work the window, even when my manager offers a cushy break in front of the lobby’s cash register. I pick up a shift on the third day when my coworker calls out sick. I am stationed at the drive-thru window every morning at seven, and every morning, his Buick pulls up to the window, and he gives me a review of whatever he last ordered, and says something striking, and funny, extending his AmEx card toward me with a flourish.
On Monday, while the baristas make him a chai: “Tell me, kid. How long can you leave the grounds sitting in the filter before they go stale? When should I toss ‘em?”
On Tuesday, when he orders a white chocolate mocha: “I’m headed into the mountains today, kid. Got one of those timed tickets for Mount Blue Sky–you know why? Because I haven’t been feeling too good lately. If I’ve only got a few years left, or even a few months, I’m not about to spend ‘em holed up in my house. Did I tell you I live just down the street? Two blocks that way. That house’ll become a prison if I don’t get my butt outside once in a while.”
On Wednesday, as I’m handing him his caramel macchiato: “You ever drive up that scenic byway to Mount Blue Sky? Chrissakes, you could sneeze and roll right off the side of the mountain. That’s a bucket list item I’m not about to repeat. I’m spending my day at the library today instead.”
And on Thursday, as I’m nursing a second burn, this one from the careless handling of a venti dark roast, he takes one look at the soggy paper towel wrapped around my wrist and says, “Tell me, kid. Why are you working here?”
“I need the money.” I’m holding his cinnamon dolce latte with my good hand. The other one smarts, throbs, cycles between going numb and catching fire. “I used to get by on freelance work alone, but not anymore. My friend and I split the rent, before.” I rest the cup on the window ledge, the slightest tremble moving from my fingers up my arm. “But she moved out last month.”
He studies me, and just like that moment when my grandfather set my suitcase at my feet and put his hand on my shoulder, mustering up just enough seriousness to disarm me, this man in the drive-thru drops the ornery grin, his soft gaze settling on mine, and says, “Why’d she move out?”
“She wouldn’t say.” My face, my neck, my chest flares hot, like I burned my whole body, and not just my hand. “Tell me something.”
“Sure.”
“How do you know when something’s worth the risk?”
I hand him his latte, and he nestles it into the cup holder beside him. “You know, sometimes we stand to lose a hell of a lot more when we don’t take the risk. Life’s tricky that way. When you play it safe, you lose anyway.”
Soon he’s driving away, while I’m still leaning out the window with my sore wrist cradled against my side, like a broken wing.

On Friday morning, as the traffic lights flash against a clouded sky, as the fog sprawls across the pavement and the dewy air lifts a shiver from my skin, 7AM comes and goes, and my late grandfather does not appear in the drive-thru. There’s no shiny AmEx card passing between us, no fanny pack, no fancy drink and a review of his last latte. “What time is it?” I ask my coworkers, a few times, though I already know the answer. It’s nearing half past seven, and I’m Googling ridiculous questions on my phone when my manager’s back is turned–How many Canadians carry American Express? Why is there so much fog in Denver right now? Is there actually any proof that ghosts exist?
But nothing I type into the search bar yields any comfort. Someone pulls up to the drive-thru with an order for seven frappuccinos. Someone orders an ice water with sixteen pumps of syrup in it. Someone else wants a trio of pup cups for the terriers yapping at me from her backseat. I don’t care much about any of them, can’t feign interest as I’m asking how their days are going, swiping their cards and handing their drinks through the window, because for some reason, somehow, I know there’s something wrong.
“I need to go,” I tell my manager as the window closes, and the woman with her three terriers is driving away.
“Why?” She stares at me, exasperated. “Are you sick? We’re busy.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I untie my apron and take off my headset. “I’ll be back.”
I don’t know if I mean it. She hasn’t even granted me permission before I’m clocking out and rushing into the fog and dumping my apron behind the driver’s seat of my car. Two blocks that way. I remember what my grandfather said about where he lives.
My car pushes through the fog. I turn off the music blaring from my speakers, searching for his Buick in one of the driveways, hoping he doesn’t keep it in a garage.
It occurs to me, as I’m glancing back and forth across the street, that I may have lost all sense of propriety. Maybe that’s what happens when ghosts visit the living, when different universes collide with one another, if that’s even what’s happening. Perhaps, if only for a day or two, we quit worrying about the things that don’t matter.
And then I see it. Gleaming white through the fog, there’s his Buick in the next driveway on the right. It’s a small house, with a budding flower garden and a pine tree growing between his house and the neighbor’s and a mailbox with the red flag raised. I park on the side of the street and leap from the car. You’ve lost your mind. I nearly run up his driveway, my hair whipping about my face, jumping up his porch steps to the front door.
I knock without thinking twice about it. I knock again, louder this time.
When there’s no answer, I run around the side of the house and look into the windows. The lights are on. I smell fresh coffee, not the stale smell that lingers on my clothes after a shift, and something burning. The air in the kitchen looks a little murky, somewhat like the fog we’ve had this week, but nothing is out of place.
When I’ve ran around the entire house and am standing on his front porch again, I knock once more. And then I try the door handle. And it opens.
“Hi, Gramps? It’s me, Allison.” I step into the entryway. “Can you hear me?”
Framed photographs line the walls, strange faces staring back at me from mountaintops and picnic tables, kayaks and dinner tables and Christmas mornings. Smoke rises in curls from the oven. I rush to the kitchen and snatch the oven mitt sitting atop the stove and open the oven door. There are muffins, black with char, smoking on the top rack. I pull them out and turn off the oven as smoke scratches at my eyes and throat and lungs, as it thickens the air around me. “Gramps? Where are you?”
When no one answers, I leave the muffins smoking on the stovetop and rush down the hall into the living room, where I find him lying facedown, between the couch and coffee table.
I let out a shriek, but the smoke alarm’s gone off, and it muffles the world around me. I wrench the coffee table across the carpet’s high pile. I drop to my knees and turn him onto his back, and I am staring into someone else’s face. A stranger’s.
I try to recall the unfamiliar name on the AmEx card, but it alludes me. He’s deathly still, unaware of this intruder kneeling next to him, or the smoke alarm screaming in our ears, or the frantic questions I’m shouting at him.
I take my phone out of my pocket with panicky, shaking hands, and almost drop it.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
I have to shout over the smoke alarm. I don’t know the address. I can’t remember this man’s real name. I can’t even say for sure if he’s had a heart attack. The woman on the other end of the line finds us anyway. She instructs me to perform CPR, her voice competing with the smoke alarm’s persistent beeping, and I do what I’m told.
With my fingers locked together and my palms pushing against his sternum, as I’m looking at his soft white lashes, pale skin and slack jaw, amidst the alarm’s blare, I whisper to him, “I think I loved her. I should’ve told you.”

He needs some sort of heart surgery. I drink a half-dozen cups of tea from the cafeteria–because God, I kind of hate coffee–exhaust the apps on my phone, numbly, take a restless nap in one of the lobby chairs, play with some of the toys they’ve got on the floor for the kids.
When his surgery is over, and one of the nurses invites me into the recovery room, I dump my tea in the trash and follow her down the hall.
I got my hopes up, and I shouldn’t have. It’s not my grandfather sitting in the hospital bed across the room, but the same elderly man I found unconscious in his home. There’s his name, the one on his credit card, printed across his hospital band: Louis Wilson. His voice is softer than my grandfather’s. His hands are softer too. He reaches for my hand and pats the top of it. He calls me an angel.
“What do you think it means,” I ask him, “For two people to save one another?”
He says something much too sincere about religion, and I know for sure that my grandfather’s gone. I leave the hospital in such a stupor, if I would have wanted to cry, I wouldn’t have known how.
The sky is a searing, brilliant blue when I step outside. A light, airy breeze ripples across my skin, rustling the sapling trees lining the sidewalk. I find my car in the parking lot and just sit there, staring through the windshield with my hands on the wheel.
There are so many questions, but my brain is too tired to sort through them. I wonder vaguely if I’ve lost my job, reaching for my phone, finding my manager in my contacts, my thumb hovering over the call button.
But instead of calling her, I call my friend, the one who moved out of our place last month. She answers, right away, as a crackle of fear sprawls across my nervous system.
“Allison?”
“Hi. Hey.” I want to tell her about my bizarre week, everything I can possibly remember about my grandfather, all the things you’d want to tell the person you love. I want to say I’m sorry, too, for never being brave enough. But instead I stare at the blistered spot on the back of my hand, letting my waxy skin reflect the sunlight back at me, and ask her to lunch.