Kathryn Harrison with her daughter, Sarah.   (Photo: Courtesy of Colin Harrison)

“That you have a baby.”

“What?”

Nana’s expression was defiant. “If you promise to have a baby as soon as possible, then I will move. That’s my offer.”

We were taken aback. But we could see that Nana was serious. We’d barely discussed having children, and her request was enormously self-indulgent. Still, I grudgingly admired her willingness to deal in the most ultimate of terms. A baby would send her own family’s flesh forward in time, and in the face of her advancing years, it was a consolation. I felt that there was a deep female logic to all this. My home for yours, your baby for me. Warm new life before cold, certain death. The equilibrium was complicated, but it made sense. Besides, if a baby could help to tear apart a family, might not a baby also help put one back together?

“Yes,” my wife said.

“What about him?” Nana asked. “He might not like living with a baby and an old hag at the same time.”

“I can handle it,” I said. Brave words, to be sure, but cheap, too. I didn’t know enough about babies to be properly scared by what it meant to agree to have one. What did scare me was what we’d already seen in our brief visit. Nana was barely functioning as an independent adult. If she slipped 5 or 10 percent further, there might be a fire, a car accident, a bad fall. We’d arrived just in time, and I would have said just about anything to get this problem fixed now.

The broker held an open house for Nana’s property, and it sold, for full price, in eighteen minutes.

We moved into our Brooklyn house, a big creaking brownstone in Park Slope. Four floors. Seven bedrooms, three baths. Seven mantels. Walnut detail throughout, never painted. Sure, it needed a little work: They all do. We were deliriously excited. This was our house now? In the hours just after the closing, my wife and I lay on the dusty parquet floor of the empty living room gazing up at the impossibly high ceilings. How would we fill this big house? How would we populate it? What life would we live that otherwise would never occur?

Meanwhile, Nana had to be moved 3,000 miles east. As promised, I dug up the cat cemetery and brought the encrusted little urns back to Brooklyn. I toted boxes filled with decades-old canceled checks, shopping flyers, and Christmas cards. These boxes often contained cat hair of unknown vintage, important documents such as birth certificates, and a fine yet unidentifiable granular matter, perhaps Nixon-era kitty litter. Nana followed a few weeks later. Her cats were flown by personal courier, at a cost that made me want to bang my head against the wall.

We settled in. My wife catered to Nana’s every need, which delighted Nana. Once a week, she was bustled off to a local hair salon, which she quite liked, sitting under a giant hair dryer among the ancient widows of Italian longshoremen who’d worked the docks of Brooklyn in days gone by. Despite their disparate backgrounds, they shared the same osteoporotic stoop and shameless application of rouge. “The hags!” Nana exclaimed when she returned, her hair a blue cloud. “You have no idea!”

After living alone for the better part of a decade, Nana’s anxieties now eased considerably. We had dinner parties, and she conversed brightly with people almost 60 years younger. She pretended to clutch her stomach and complain in French about her liver. While sitting in a lawn chair next to the front stoop, she engaged the mailman in small talk and charmed whoever happened to go by. She called everyone she knew in California and bragged about the marvelous house she lived in with her “most beautiful and smart granddaughter.” It was, for her, a genuine adventure, as if she had departed on a very long cruise on an ocean liner as big as Brooklyn, with a stateroom the size and configuration of a brownstone.

Nana spent innumerable hours each day examining her mail, tidying up the kitchen, making tea for herself, and writing small checks to the large number of animal charities that had already discovered her new address. Her cats ran amok in her apartment. She complained about my wife’s cooking but begged for more of it. She insisted that we inspect the inside of her nose by flashlight each night before she went to sleep. She demanded a variety of goopy cat food so obscure and expensive that it was not sold anywhere in the borough, and some of this molten beef sauce ended up on her glasses each day. She consumed box after box of English cookies. She tended to fall asleep on the sofa after dinner, her swollen ankles set together. She complained that I was “a lout,” and when my wife got angry at that, she cried for forgiveness and kissed her hand and said her life had been saved. But this was minor. Mostly, the whole thing felt easy and domestic. My wife and I wondered if something a little bit fantastic had happened. Nana was happy. And my wife was happy.