The Counting Game

My grandmother told me about it on her deathbed, which felt appropriately dramatic for a secret she'd kept for sixty-three years.

"Every night," she whispered, her voice like paper tearing, "your grandfather and I would count."

I leaned closer, expecting something profound. A ritual prayer, perhaps. A meditation. Something I could Instagram with a gauzy filter and the word legacy in the caption.

"Count what?" I asked.

"Everything we had," she said. "Every single thing."

It started in 1961, the week after their wedding. They were broke. Catastrophically, absurdly broke — the kind of broke where you count coins for bread and feel lucky to find a dime.

One night, my grandfather emptied his pockets onto their secondhand table. Two dollars and thirty-seven cents. A button. A receipt from a hardware store.

"That's everything," he said.

My grandmother picked up each item, one by one.

"A quarter," she said. "Another quarter. A dime. A nickel. Three pennies." She touched the button. "A button for your good coat." She unfolded the receipt. "Proof that you bought me curtain rods." She looked at him. "And you."

"I don't count," he said.

"You count the most."

They did it again the next night. And the next.

The rules evolved over the years, my grandmother explained. They never wrote them down, but they understood them perfectly.

First: Count everything physical. The coins in the jar. The cans in the cupboard. The books on the shelf — even the ones they'd never read, because intention counts too. The chairs. The plates. The single, ridiculous painting of a horse they'd bought at a garage sale because it made them laugh.

Second: Count everything invisible. The hours of sleep they'd gotten. The meals shared. The inside jokes that no one else would find funny. The arguments resolved and the ones tabled, which also counts as resolution, just slower.

Third: Count each other. Always last. Always out loud.

"And you," my grandmother would say.

"And you," he'd reply.

I thought about this for weeks after she died. It seemed too simple to matter. A counting game? What was the point?

Then I understood: the point was the counting.

Every night, they forced themselves to notice. To inventory. To say, this is what we have right now, tonight, in this room, together. Not what they'd lost. Not what they wanted. What they had.

It was a ritual of attention. Of presence. Of refusing to let abundance go uncounted just because it was ordinary.

My grandfather died four months after she did. His heart, the doctors said, though everyone knew better.

I helped clean out their house. In the bedroom closet, I found a shoebox I'd never seen before. Inside: sixty-three years of receipts. Hardware stores. Grocery runs. A lamp purchased in 1987. A vacuum cleaner from 2004.

Worthless paper, all of it. Except.

On the back of each receipt, in my grandmother's handwriting, a number. 47. 213. 1,459. The count from that night, I realized. Everything they had.

The last receipt was from three weeks before she was hospitalized. A pharmacy. On the back, she'd written: 2,847.

Below the number, in different ink, my grandfather had added two words:

And you.

I started counting last month. My apartment. My books. My ridiculous collection of coffee mugs I don't need. The friends I haven't called but could. The job I complain about but have.

It's not magic. It doesn't fix anything. But every night, for three minutes, I make myself say it out loud:

"And me."

Maybe one day it'll be two voices instead of one. Until then, I'll keep counting.

The ritual isn't about the number. It's about the practice of noticing you have anything at all.