My grandfather’s last joke is written on the back of a parking ticket

Dear Delyara, My grandfather died at ninety-one. He had been losing speech after a stroke, so jokes became rare. Today, my aunt gave me a parking ticket he had apparently kept in his wallet. On the back, in shaky handwriting, he had written: Tell Ben I finally found something more expensive than his haircut. I am Ben. I spend too much on haircuts, according to everyone over seventy in my family. He must have received the ticket during one of his final trips out. I remember visiting him afterward. He could barely speak that day. Maybe he wrote the joke because he knew he would not be able to say it when he saw me. I cried over a parking fine like an idiot. Grandpa had a way of making affection impossible to separate from insult. He never said he missed me. He would say, “Look who remembered the road to my house.” He never said I looked good. He would ask whether the barber had charged extra for mistakes. Tonight, that ticket is pinned above my desk. Forty-five dollars for illegal parking, one final insult, and somehow the clearest proof that he was thinking about me when words were already becoming difficult.