“Come by again, Eddie,” Russell offered.
I didn’t have to say that I would.
That night I snuck downstairs again to watch Johnny Carson. As I came around the corner into the living room, I saw that it was lit with the flickering greenish tint of the television. My grandfather sat on the coffee table, his nose nearly touching the screen. “Grandpa?”
“Shhh,” he said with a finger to his lips. Then he slid over on the table, leaving just enough room for me.
I sat next to him and we watched together in silence, wanting to laugh, but afraid to be discovered by Grandma. I could feel the hardness of his strong arm against my skinny one. For one showing of El Dorado, the warm feelings that we had last shared too long ago were back. Grandpa didn’t know it, but even though I was looking at the TV I was really watching the story of the last year replay in my head.
I wanted to go back but didn’t know how. So instead I just sat there.
Eleven
I need your help today,” Grandpa said cheerfully over breakfast the next morning. After we ate and cleared our dishes, he led me to the smaller of the two barns. The left half had been cleaned up and turned into storage for Grandma’s craft supplies. She was always knitting or quilting or sewing. What was now my room had once been Grandma’s old sewing room; when I’d moved in, Grandpa had moved all her stuff out here into his workshop.
The right half of the barn was still Grandpa’s. The border between neatness and clutter separated the two areas just as well as any wall would have. He took me to the far corner of the barn and pulled an old sheet off what looked to me like a pile of scrap lumber.
“What are we doing, Grandpa?”
“Building your grandmother’s Christmas gift,” he answered. “Of course it’s a secret,” he added in a tone of mock warning.
I had completely forgotten; Christmas was just over a month away. I couldn’t believe it had snuck up on me like that, probably because it had been such an unseasonably warm winter so far. Growing up, I’d always been jealous of Grandma and Grandpa, because they’d always gotten so much more snow than we had. Even though they didn’t live that far away, the rain/snow line on the weatherman’s map always seemed to run right between us. There had been plenty of storms where we’d been flooded and they’d had snowdrifts up to the top of their porch.
There had been times when I’d imagined myself running away and moving in with them just to get more snow days off from school. I’d pictured Grandpa and me getting up early, making a snow fort in the front yard, and drinking hot chocolate all day. Grandpa probably wouldn’t even make me wear the bread-bag boots, I’d thought. It had seemed like a dream.
But now that I was living that “dream,” I realized just how wrong I’d been. Sure, there were no bread-bag boots, but there was also no snow. Not one inch. There hadn’t been all year. Things aren’t always what they seem. Taylor’s voice played in my mind.
Grandpa handed me some sandpaper and pointed to a stack of carefully cut pieces of wood that were arranged on the floor and on his worktable. “These need to be as smooth as a rock from the stream. Start with the coarse paper and work your way down to the fine, black paper. I’ve got a few more pieces to cut.”
This was the last thing I felt like doing. “What are we making?” I asked, hoping I would be able to figure out a shortcut that didn’t involve sandpaper.
“I think it would be more fun if I don’t tell you,” Grandpa replied. “Maybe you can guess as we start to put it together.” He was being coy, probably because he knew why I was asking.
“Why don’t you just go out and buy her something instead?” I suggested. “I’m sure she’d rather have something new from a store.”
My grandfather looked at me like he had never seen me before. “No, she wouldn’t. Besides, it makes you happier when you focus on making other people happy.” They were my mother’s words in my grandfather’s voice.
He left me sitting alone on a stool. I sanded for a while but stopped when my hands began to cramp. It was obvious that I would never be a craftsman. The regular sounds coming from the other corner of the barn told me that Grandpa was busy and not coming to check on me anytime soon, so I began to explore. Taylor and I had snuck in a couple of times before, but I’d always been afraid that my grandfather would somehow know we’d been in there. It was the only place on the entire farm that I was forbidden to go.
I crossed over to the tidy side and began to look through my grandmother’s things. There were flowers drying on a potting bench and what looked like a sewing-machine museum along the wall. There was an old Singer powered only by a foot pedal connected by a leather belt to a big metal wheel. I was so intrigued by how it worked that I didn’t notice the workshop had fallen silent.
Next to the old sewing machines was a set of shelves that my grandfather had obviously made by hand. They were packed with extra fabric and half-finished quilts, bolts of pajama and shirt fabric, yarn and knitting supplies. One particular ball of yarn caught my attention, and I picked it up. As I ran a strand of it between my fingers—it was rough and soft at the same time—my grandfather came and stood next to me.
“Some of this was your mother’s. She was knitting by the time she was eight. She looked so funny; the needles were almost as long as her arms.”
As he talked, I remembered Mom knitting my Christmas sweater every night, right there in front of me. I looked up at him with dry eyes. “I’m not very good at sanding.”
“That’s okay, Eddie. There are some things I’m not very good at either. For instance, I’m pretty rusty at raising kids. Your grandmother did most of the work with your mom. When you came along, I thought that having a grandson was going to be fun and easy. I was right…at least for a while.”
Memories of fishing trips and ice cream cones and rigged card games flashed through my mind. It had been so long since we’d done any of the fun things we used to.
Things were different now.
Grandpa paused, as if he was trying to collect himself. When he spoke again, his voice was lower and unsteady. “Son, you and I are very much the same. We’re stubborn. We always want to show people how wrong they are, how we don’t need anyone but ourselves. Well, I want you to know how wrong I was. I was trying to teach you a lesson, and instead I missed what was right in front of me: your mom was too tired to drive that night. I made a mistake, and I’ll regret it until the day that I die.”
I wanted to drop the yarn in my hands and wrap my arms around Grandpa. I wanted so badly for things to be the way they were before. I thought about what Russell had told me. Did Grandpa really even know who he was? Was he really happy? Could he be feeling as lonely and abandoned as I was?
Before I could say anything, Grandpa went on. “Sometimes our strengths are also our weaknesses. Sometimes to be strong you have to first be weak. You have to share your burdens; you have to lean on other people while you face your problems and yourself. That’s hard to do, but your family is there to provide a shelter from the storms that come in everyone’s life.”
The yarn suddenly felt alive in my hands. I imagined Mom finishing my sweater, cutting the last bit off with her teeth. She must have been so proud. Then I saw my mother staring at that sweater rolled up in a ball on my bedroom floor. The thought of it brought back a rash of emotions, none of them good. I focused on my grandfather.
Then, once again, I pushed him away.
“I don’t want any help,” I spat. “Everyone I’ve ever loved has been taken from me. I’m not letting that happen again. I don’t need anyone. I know who I am. I’m not like you and I never will be. I’m going to be rich. I won’t have to be cheap with the woman I claim to love and make her a present—I’ll buy her a real one. My kids will have what they need.”
I threw the yarn down as if it had been a snake and turned to run. My grandfather stepped in front of me and clamped his hands onto my shoulders. I knew that struggling wouldn’t do me any good, so I just struck as defiant a p
ose as I could and stared straight ahead into his chest.
“Look at me.” I didn’t move my head; I just rolled my eyes up until I was looking into his. “First of all, I love you, Eddie, and I’m not going anywhere. Neither is your grandmother.”
“You can’t promise that,” I protested. I couldn’t let him in. “You don’t know.” I didn’t even hear the first part of what he’d said.
“You’re right, I don’t know, but you can’t live the rest of your life in fear, guilt, and anger forever. Like it or not, life is a series of events that we don’t always understand or appreciate. What happened to your mother isn’t your fault and it isn’t mine. It was an accident. Just a stupid accident.”
I was right on the verge of a complete breakdown. All of the hurt, all of the pain, all of the memories wanted to burst through at once. “Eddie,” Grandpa continued, “I think you have a basic misunderstanding of what you want and what you need. We don’t always get what we want, but the things that you’ve wanted lately, you certainly don’t need.”
My swirling emotions turned directly into anger. I said the most hurtful thing I could think of. “So I guess I didn’t need a mom or a dad then.”
I was trying to trap him, hoping he would lash out at me. It would have been easier for us both if we’d just stopped talking, but Grandpa wasn’t going to be played that easily. “Eddie, we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we react to it. We are all meant to be happy. Even you, Eddie, as hard as it is for you to believe sometimes, you are meant to be happy. If you’re not happy, it’s not God’s fault, it’s not my fault, or anyone else’s fault. It’s your own.”
The words lit a fire inside me. I rushed to put it out before it began to melt the coldness I had come to depend on when I felt threatened by kindness. “You’re only trying to make excuses for God and for yourself. I’m not happy because of me? Really? Where was God when Mom couldn’t even keep food in the house? Where were you when Mom was spending every free minute turning that yarn into the only gift she could afford? I thought family was supposed to take care of family.”
“You’re out of line, son.” He let go of me like I had let go of the yarn.
“No, I’m not. I’m right. You know it.” I sensed something building inside Grandpa that I hadn’t expected. Fear? Guilt? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t about to back down.
He took a step back and put a hand on a shelf full of yarn to steady himself. He considered me for a few seconds. I could tell that he was making an important decision.
“Everyone was trying to help you two, Eddie. But your mom always refused it. We aren’t rich, mind you, but we could have done more than she let us. She wanted to take care of you herself—she felt like a hand-up was the same as a hand-out, and she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to feel like she’d failed. She was wrong, and she was stubborn. I guess you two have even more in common than I thought.”
Even though I had spent my childhood wearing bread-bag boots to school, I’d never really had any idea just how much my parents had struggled. It wasn’t until after my mother died that I began to piece it all together.
“Let me show you something.” Grandpa squeezed between the sewing machines and the shelving and into the corner of Grandma’s part of the barn. I followed him, and we stood next to each other in front of a green canvas tarp. It smelled like camping. He looked at me again as if he still wasn’t sure whether he should do what he was about to. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally said, “Your mother didn’t know about this. She wouldn’t have liked it. She would have thought it was too much.”
He grabbed the center of the tarp and pulled it away.
A brand-new Huffy.
I was speechless. It was the gift I’d wished for but never gotten: bright red with a black vinyl banana seat and big, curved chrome handlebars.
My gaze shifted down to the tires. Twenty playing cards had been placed into the spokes of each wheel to make a custom “clicking” sound as the wheels turned. I recognized the cards immediately as being from Grandpa’s favorite deck.
No wonder he wouldn’t play with me that day, I thought.
My guilt multiplied. I couldn’t move. My mind was a tangled mess of thoughts, memories, and emotions.
Grandpa finally broke the silence. “See, Eddie, sometimes the gift you want most is right in front of you, but you have to get out of your own way to receive it.”
I couldn’t speak, but the expression on my face said more than I ever could.
Grandpa continued, “Grandma knew that I’d taught you some of my present-hunting tricks, so she wouldn’t let me hide this anywhere in the house. We planned to give it to you as soon as we were done with the other gifts, but then you gave your mother a hard time about staying over. I…well, I wanted to teach you a lesson.” Grandpa’s words trailed off as tears escaped from his eyes and slowly rolled down his cheeks.
Grandpa was crying.
“Son, if I thought something as simple as a bike could make you happy, I would have given this to you a long time ago. But a bike can’t. No material thing can. You have to find your way back to the things that will give you lasting happiness, and you can’t buy them in a store.”
I heard Grandpa speaking, but I was transfixed on the Huffy. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I felt like it might disappear, just like everything else that was good in my life.
“See, Eddie, you’re not alone. You never were. We didn’t abandon you, or your mother, and we never will.”
I felt like speaking, but I couldn’t move my mouth. Everything I had made myself believe was turning out to be wrong—and I wasn’t prepared to face that.
Grandpa went on, “I have some ‘if onlys’ about that day, too. If only I hadn’t taught you how to hunt for presents. If only I hadn’t tried to teach you a lesson. If only I’d demanded that you stay. If only I had given you the bike. If only I hadn’t been so…stubborn.”
I slowly shifted my gaze from the bicycle to my grandfather. His eyes were red, wet, and very tired. I considered him and felt the now familiar crush of emotions weighing on me, begging me to cave in and fall into his strong arms. I pushed back with every ounce of energy I had left.
Every time I trusted someone, I got hurt. Every time I let go, I was let down. Not again. I would drive them away before they left.
I steadied myself and looked deep into my grandfather’s eyes. “You gave me that big speech about God and happiness before, but look at you; you’re not happy. You’ve been fooling everyone for the last year, but not me. I see right through you.” I wasn’t about to let go of my guilt and anger so easily, and I certainly wasn’t about to share it with the person I had convinced myself was causing most of it.
Grandpa looked stunned. I went for the knockout punch. “Mom would be alive if it wasn’t for you making us leave that day.”
Now it was Grandpa’s turn to be speechless. I sensed his vulnerability, and it made me even stronger. “You can go to church all you want, but none of the people there are really happy, so stop your preaching. Stop telling me how great things are because ‘Jesus loves me,’ and how happy we are because ‘God is with us’ and how ‘we’re the perfect little family.’ It’s all a lie.” I was virtually shouting now. “Do you know why it’s a lie? Because there is no God. Jesus doesn’t love you. Jesus doesn’t care.”
My words hung in the air, as if caught in the dusty rafters of the old barn. Tears once again began to run down my grandfather’s cheeks. I went in for the kill. “I’m the only real one in this family. I know who I am. I will be happy when I’m far away from here, when I don’t have to worry about other people doing stupid things, like making their tired daughter drive.”
I ran from the barn with unseen tears running down my cheeks. My grandfather was left alone with a bicycle and the yarn of a hundred unmade sweaters.
I stared at my bedroom ceiling, its smooth white plaster standing in stark contrast to the cracked, water-stained ceiling of
my bedroom at home. Home, where I belonged. I felt like I should be crying, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sad.
I thought about the bike and all that it symbolized: hope and happiness; death and despair. Grandpa’s words flashed through my head. You have to share your burdens; you have to lean on other people…We are all meant to be happy.
They were nice sentiments, but they were just words and I was done talking; my snowball had grown too large. Russell was right—figuring out the who would lead to the “what” and the “where,” and now I had all three answers: My grandparents’ farm was the “what” and it was part of “who” I used to be. Now it would soon be time to show everyone the “where.”
I got up from my bed and went over to the dresser. It had five drawers, only four of which I ever used. My sweater was in the fifth drawer, at the very bottom. It was the only thing in there.
A mirror hung on the wall just over the dresser, but I avoided looking myself in the eyes. Something inside was telling me that I was going down the wrong road and that I needed to start over with my grandparents—but I ignored it. It was easy to fool other people, but, for some reason, the mirror made it harder and harder to fool myself.
I took the sweater out, held it to my nose, and took a deep breath of my mother. I felt completely, utterly lost. My old life and the old me were gone, and she was gone with it. I was filled with regret.
I never even had a chance to say good-bye.
Twelve
My grandfather wasted no time in picking up right where we had left off in the barn. After breakfast the next morning he followed me into the living room as Grandma cleared the dishes. “Who do you think you’re hurting?” he asked with a carefully controlled voice. Yesterday’s old, tired eyes were now steely blue.
“I’m just trying to get out of here.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen. You’re going to be here for a good while. I told you yesterday, I’m not going anywhere, and, son, neither are you. In the meantime, you and I need to come to an understanding. This is not negotiable: You will obey me and respect your grandmother. She is the kindest, gentlest, most giving person you will ever meet. She has suffered enough. I can handle all of your selfish hatred, but I swear, if you break that woman’s heart anymore, you’re gonna have to answer to me.”