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She pointed at the sofa opposite her. “Sit.”
I sat.
It was really the only thing to do when she told you to.
“What happened?”
I glanced at her book. “Is that real to you?”
“The book? It’s not imaginary, Max. You can see it.” She tapped it against her hand. “Feels pretty ruddy real to me.”
“No, not the book itself. I mean the story. The characters.”
Grandma picked it up and turned it over a few times, looking at both the front and the back cover before she turned back to me. “I suppose it is when I’m reading it. Why?”
“Why? It’s just a book.”
“Wash your mouth out with soap, young man.”
“Why does everyone have that reaction? It’s not real. It’s just a book.”
She peered at me over the top of her glasses, and disapproval radiated from her in waves. “Get out of my library.”
“Technically, it’s my library.”
“Not with your attitude it’s not. I’m taking it back. I’ll move my bed in here, child. Don’t test me.”
I took a deep breath and sighed it out. “Help me out here. I upset Ellie last night when I told her that her characters aren’t real and it cut dinner short, and she just about chewed my arse out about it.”
“Good. She should have done. What did you say?”
I told her everything I’d said and everything Ellie had said back—about the widow, the woman with cancer, the student, the man whose father had heart surgery, and the siblings who read to escape the horrors of dementia as it gripped their mother.
“I guess I just don’t understand,” I said after I’d explained. “I’ve read some of Ellie’s work and she’s an incredible writer, but I simply don’t understand how something can be so real when it isn’t.”
Grandma shuffled to the edge of the sofa, picking up her book. She walked around the table, and when she reached me, she thumped me on the back of the head with her paperback.
“Ouch!” I rubbed that spot. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I did not raise an ignorant, obtuse little git!”
“Bloody hell, it’s like there’s a conspiracy against me.”
She waved her book in my face. “Are you or are you not the man who shouts at the television every week during the football season?”
I didn’t answer.
“They can’t bloody hear you, but you sit there directing them as though they can!” Grandma looked pointedly at me.
“Yes, but they’re actually playing football, Grandma.”
“And you are not Barry Southgate!”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth. “Gareth. His name is Gareth.”
“I couldn’t give a hoot what his name is. You’re a thirty-year-old man and you play football manager for some thirty-something weeks a year, and you thinkbooksaren’t realistic?”
I pressed my lips together. “You shout at your books all the time.”
