Nana.   (Photo: Courtesy of Colin Harrison)

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “I spent years getting free of her!”

This was certainly true. My wife’s mother had become accidentally pregnant at 17, submitted to a quickie marriage and divorce, and then more or less deposited her newborn baby into Nana’s hands as the price for her release. She’d moved away, always residing at some temporary and sometimes unknown address. As Kathy grew up, the three of them—grandmother, mother, and daughter—had engaged in an ornate yet ferocious battle for autonomy, control, and identity. In this struggle, which did not end when my wife’s mother died of breast cancer at the age of 43, money was a weapon, love always provisional, and screaming a constant. As far as Kathy was concerned, her real life had begun when she escaped her grandmother’s house.

“Where could she live?” Kathy asked.

I stared at her.

“No,” she said. “We’re newlyweds. This is our first year. I don’t want to take care of my 89-year-old grandmother.”

“Just an idea,” I said.

An idea I’d been quietly studying. As the Brooklyn real-estate market steadily floated upward, the L.A. market had become an insane speculators’ bazaar. The upward rise was bound to crash sooner or later, but until then, Nana’s ranch house, even with its earthquake damage, cracked swimming pool, and walls stained by cat mucus, had appreciated dramatically.

“Did you know,” I ventured, “that the value of your grandmother’s house would probably cover a good chunk of a house here?”

My wife looked at me, aware that my motivations were decidedly mixed. “You would think of that.”

“Hey, maybe we could do a good thing, but maybe that could be good for us too,” I said. We were going to have to take action, one way or another. We’d either initiate change or have it forced upon us.

“I can’t live with her,” Kathy said. “She’ll drive me crazy.”

I didn’t especially want to live with an 89-year-old woman myself. I was 28, for Christ’s sake, and running out to dinner parties with my beautiful young wife, and working hard, and playing in a basketball league at night, and generally having the time of my life. The idea of living with Nana was insane. What had gotten into me?

But now my wife was thinking about it. “Nana has no one else,” Kathy said. “She’s frightened. That’s a big house to go to sleep in by yourself each night.”

“She’d be happy if you moved there.”

“But she knows I won’t.”

“So why is she calling so often? I mean, the reason under the reason?”

We stopped walking. No matter how difficult her upbringing, my wife had said many times that the bottom line was that her grandmother had always taken care of her, sheltered her, paid for school, college, everything.

“Nana is asking me to fix it,” she said slowly.

Within a week, my wife had proposed to Nana that she move to Brooklyn. She would sell her house and help us buy a brownstone, where we all would live, Nana in her own ground-floor apartment, the two of us above her. The plan now excited Kathy, and I could see why: It offered a way for the two of them to be together in a setting other than the one where so much familial destruction had occurred. Maybe a little redemption might be possible. The plan possessed a certain theoretical elegance, but its enormity scared me. Executing the two transactions would be entirely my responsibility; not only were the sums involved considerable, but I would have to sell real estate in Los Angeles while buying it in New York almost simultaneously. If one part of the plan failed, the whole thing failed.

“I’m not moving,” Nana said.

“What will you do?”

“Someone will take care of me.”

“Who?”

That was when the crying began. “Nana, I am absolutely not moving to Los Angeles,” Kathy said. “I’m young. I have my life here.”

Nana wouldn’t budge.

“Tell her that’s the best we can think of,” I said.

“Nana, this is the best we can think of.”

“Tell her nursing homes are $6,000 a month.”

Kathy put her hand over the phone. “I’m not going to tell her that.”

“Tell her—hell, I don’t know what to tell her.”

A month later, my wife and I flew to Los Angeles, having made no headway with Nana, even though there had been more incidents. Something about the car and a large bush. Another time, Nana had become lost while driving on the freeways, finally needing a police escort home. She had dropped one of her $800 hearing aids in the kitchen disposal. And so on. Meanwhile, the L.A. real-estate market was teetering at wild heights, ripe for a crash, and the Brooklyn market was still rising. If our plan was to work, it needed to work soon, before the markets went in opposite directions.