To Build a Home

Grammy's Accident

Mike is 14 and Harvey is 30 in this story

CHAPTER 1: NOT YOUR YEAR
Every day it starts again

You cannot say if you're happy

You keep trying to be; try harder

Maybe, maybe this is not your year

This is not your year

-"Not Your Year" by The Weepies

Fourteen, Mike Ross decided, is not my year. Granted, he had only been fourteen for a few hours, but things were not exactly looking up. Instead of enjoying birthday dinner and cake with Grammy and Trevor and Jenny like he had originally planned, he was pacing around in a hospital waiting room, anxiously awaiting an update from the doctor on Grammy's wellbeing.

It was all the stupid factory's fault. Grammy really was too old to be working there— she was almost seventy years old, after all, and most of her friends had retired 5 or 10 years ago. So maybe this was really all Mike's fault, because he knew that he was the reason why Grammy was still working at said stupid factory in the first place. Providing food and clothes for a growing teenager wasn't exactly cheap, and Mike and Grammy couldn't survive on just Grammy's pension money. So Grammy had gone back to work a few years ago at the McKinnon Pharmaceutical Lab.

McKinnon Pharmaceutical was a huge corporation. They produced medical supplies and drugs and Grammy worked in the factory assembling blood pressure cuffs and stethoscopes. It was mind-numbing, menial labor but nobody else wanted to hire a seventy-year-old woman, so Grammy did it, and she did it without complaint. She was very good at letting on that it was fine and that she didn't mind working, but Mike knew that it exhausted her and couldn't help but blame himself for the way her back ached and her tired eyes strained to see at the end of the day. He felt guilty that she had begun developing arthritis in her hands from the repetitive motions the job required— her poor hands, which had worked so hard to stitch his baby blanket fourteen years ago, could barely grasp a needle properly now. And he felt terrible that instead of finding a new hobby or travelling or meeting up with her gardening club for lunch like her retired friends, she was forced to work so hard to put food on the table for him. Mike was counting down the days until he turned fifteen and could get a work permit and start contributing to their meager income. The factory didn't pay well at all, and, in Mike's opinion, they were complete assholes that were only interested in making money.

Mike shivered as he remembered the phone call he had received earlier that evening. He had gotten home from school at 3 and been waiting for Grammy to come home at 5. She was planning on making his favorite dinner for his birthday and Trevor and Jenny were going to come over for cake and ice cream to celebrate. At first he hadn't been too worried when she didn't show up at home right at 5 like she usually did. Maybe she had missed the bus she usually took or had gotten held up at work by something. But when 5:30 and then 6:00 rolled around, Mike began to grow nervous. He had been anxiously pacing around the living room while Trevor and Jenny sat on the couch and tried to convince him to calm down and stop overreacting when the phone rang and Mike's worst fears were confirmed. It was the hospital close to the factory and they were calling to tell him that Grammy had fallen at work that afternoon and they were doing x-rays on her to determine the extent of her injuries.

He had breathlessly explained the situation to Trevor and Jenny and had then sprinted the 16 blocks to the hospital where he had sat in the crowded waiting room for hours, watching as the crowd slowly dwindled and then eventually disappeared altogether as the evening dissolved into night. At about 8 a young resident had come to tell Mike that the x-rays had showed that Grammy had a badly broken hip and femur and that they were prepping her for surgery. Mike had been waiting since then, his anxious feet tapping a now-familiar rhythm on the hospital floor as he paced.