The Forgotten Grandfather: In a nursing home, a grandfather goes years without visitors… until a kindergartener starts coming every week to read him stories.

The Forgotten Grandfather: In a nursing home, a grandfather goes years without visitors… until a kindergartener starts coming every week to read him stories.

I’ve been in this room for three years, four months, and eleven days. It’s not that I count obsessively, but when you have nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling and listen to the nurses’ hurried footsteps, numbers become your only companions.

My name is Aurelio Mendoza, I’m eighty-two years old, and my family brought me here after I fell in the shower. “It’s the best thing for you, Dad,” they told me. “You’ll be well cared for.” The first few weeks they came religiously. Afterward, the visits became more limited. First every two weeks, then once a month, then only at Christmas.

Until they stopped coming altogether.

That Tuesday afternoon, like every Tuesday afternoon for the past two years, I was in my wheelchair by the window, watching the leaves fall from the old oak tree in the yard, when I heard a small voice I didn’t recognize.

“Are you Mr. Aurelio?”

I turned slowly. A small boy, about five years old, was looking at me with huge, curious eyes. He was carrying a backpack almost as big as him and a book in his hands.

“Yes, it’s me,” I replied, surprised. “And who are you?

” “My name is Mateo. I came from the kindergarten on the corner. Miss Clara says you need stories read to you.”

I was silent for a moment, processing his words.

“Miss Clara?

” “Yes, she organizes visits for the grandparents who are alone. She chose me because I’m the best reader in the entire five-year-old class.”

The pride in his voice made me smile for the first time in months.

“And what book do you have there?

” “The Little Prince,” he said, holding up the little book as if it were a treasure. “Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Please,” I whispered.

Mateo pulled up a small chair he had found somewhere and sat down next to me. He opened the book carefully, as if it were very fragile, and began to read with that particular cadence of children just learning:

“When I was six years old, I once saw a magnificent picture…”

His voice was sweet and uncertain; he stumbled over some difficult words, but he pressed on with determination. I listened, entranced, not so much by the story I knew by heart, but by the miracle of having someone there, reading to me.

“Mr. Aurelio,” he said when he finished the first chapter, “do you have grandchildren?”

The question hurt me more than I expected.

“Yes, I have two. But they’re very busy with their own things.”

“Don’t they come to visit him?”

“Not much,” I lied.

Mateo frowned thoughtfully.

“Well, now he has me. I’ll come every Tuesday.”

And he kept his promise.

Every Tuesday at three in the afternoon, after his classes, Mateo would show up with his giant backpack and some new book. First we finished “The Little Prince,” then we read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” then “The Witches” by Roald Dahl. His reading improved week by week, but I had stopped paying attention only to the content. I had fallen in love with his presence.

“Mr. Aurelio,” he said to me one Tuesday, after reading a chapter of “Matilda,” “why are you always so sad?”

His question caught me off guard.

“Do I look sad?

” “Yes. Mom says that when people are sad it’s because they miss someone. Do you miss someone?”

I stared into his sincere little eyes. At that moment, I decided he deserved the truth.

—I miss my family, Mateo. Sometimes the people we love forget about us.

—Like when I forget to feed my fish?

—Something like that, but worse.

Mateo thought about it, swinging his legs from the chair.

—You know what? I’m never going to forget you.

And he didn’t.

Months went by. Mateo grew a little, his reading became more fluid, more expressive. I looked forward to Tuesdays like I used to look forward to Christmas. I dressed up especially for him, combed my hair, put on my least wrinkled shirt.

One day he came home quieter than usual.

—What’s up, champ?

—Mr. Aurelio, Miss Clara says I’m going to a new school next year. It’s far away.

My heart sank.

—Oh.

—But I promised her I’d keep coming. I told my mom, and she says she’ll bring me by bus.

—Mateo, you can’t ask your mom for that. It’s too far away.

“But we’re friends!” she protested, her eyes watering. “Friends don’t abandon each other!”

That word, “abandon,” resonated in my chest like a painful echo.

“You’re right,” I told her. “Friends don’t abandon each other.”

On her last day in the garden on the corner, Mateo arrived with a gift: a photo album he had put together himself. On the first page, he had written in his irregular handwriting: “To my grandfather from my heart.”

The pages were filled with his drawings: him and me reading together, the oak tree in the courtyard, the room—he’d even drawn the nurses. On the last page, he’d pasted a photo his mother had taken of us on a random Tuesday, the two of us smiling with a book in between.

“So he doesn’t forget me,” she told me.

“I could never forget you, Mateo.”

We hugged, and for the first time in three years, four months, and many more days, I cried from happiness instead of sadness.

Mateo kept his promise. He comes every two weeks now, accompanied by his mother, a sweet woman who greets me as if I were part of her family. He no longer reads children’s stories; now we’re reading “Don Quixote,” and we discuss each chapter like two intellectuals.

The other day, while I was reading about the adventures of the Ingenious Hidalgo, he said to me:

“Señor Aurelio, do you know that you changed my life?

” “Me?” I asked, surprised. “Mateo, you changed mine.

” “Really?”

“Before you arrived, I was like this nursing home: a place where things go to wait for the end. You taught me that life can begin at any age, if there’s someone who wants to share it with you.”

Mateo smiled, that smile that lights up the entire room.

“Okay, but now we have to keep reading. I want to know if Don Quixote finds Dulcinea.

” “He will,” I assured him. “People who seek true love always find it. It’s just that sometimes it comes in forms we don’t expect.”

As Mateo resumed reading, I thought about how true that was. I had looked for love in visits from my family, in recognition, in memory. But love had arrived in the form of a five-year-old boy with a huge backpack and an even bigger heart.

Now, when people ask me about my family, I tell them about Mateo. My beloved grandson, my companion in literary adventures, my proof that it’s never too late to find someone who chooses you, who visits you, who reads you stories, and who reminds you that you’re still part of the world.

Because in the end, family isn’t always the one born with you. Sometimes, it’s the one you decide to build, on any given Tuesday, one page at a time.