The prealarm sounded. She was barely able to hear it over the blaring television. Granny still wasn’t wearing her hearing aid.She set her purse on the kitchen counter and dropped her jacket onto a dinette chair. Turning the oven on low, she shoved the pizza inside.She heard the television in the next room broadcasting that Celine Dion song from the movie Titanic, but a woman other than Celine was singing. At the song’s final note, a wave of whimsy hit Vining and she closed the oven door with a flourish, doing a half pirouette and posing with her hand in the air. The television audience applauded thunderously.Walking from the kitchen into the adjacent television room, she saw Nanette Brown, her grandmother, reclined in the Lay-Z-Boy, covered with the chenille throw, dead asleep, snoring vigorously.The television was broadcasting Dancing with the Stars. Vining picked up the remote control from Granny’s lap, taking a moment to marvel at the indestructibility of the old woman’s set-and-comb-out, which she had done once a week by the same hairstylist she’d gone to for decades, ever since she’d closed the beauty parlor that she had run out of her home.
