At first, every conversation felt like a lie.
“That you, baby girl?”
“It’s me, Grandpa.”
Every time I said it, something in my stomach turned over.
But he never questioned me.
Instead, he told me stories about the military, his late wife, and his life.
Basic training at nineteen.
A wife named Loretta who could sing, and did, at every wedding in the county for forty years.
A daughter he’d raised alone after Loretta passed, “as best I could, which some days wasn’t very.”
A granddaughter who used to sit on this same porch and read him the sports page when his eyes started going, “before all of it.”
He never said what “all of it” was.
I never asked.
I’d been told not to.
Over time, we grew close.
I learned that he took his coffee with three sugars and pretended it was one.
I learned that he could tell what kind of car was passing by the sound, and was right nine times out of ten, and would sulk about the tenth.
I learned that when he said “Loretta would’ve liked you,” he meant it as the highest thing he had.
I learned things about my own family I hadn’t meant to say — about Jaylen’s treatments, about my mother’s two jobs, about the diner off Route 14 — because a blind man on a porch is the easiest person in the world to tell the truth to, and because he asked, every Sunday, “How’s that brother of yours?” and waited for the real answer.
“You’re carrying too much, baby girl,” he said once.
“I’m fine, Grandpa.”
“Mm. Loretta used to say ‘I’m fine’ just like that. Meant she’d sooner fall down than ask for a hand.”
I hadn’t known, then, that he was asking about a brother he had no reason to know existed.
I hadn’t thought about it at all.
I’d just answered him.
Eventually, it stopped feeling like a job and started feeling like family.
I stopped cashing the checks on the way home and started cashing them on Tuesdays, because Sunday felt like the wrong day to be paid.
Then his health began to fail.
The visits got shorter.
He got quieter.
Some Sundays he’d just hold my hand on the green blanket and listen to the street with me.
A few months later, he passed away.
I cried harder than I expected.
At the fun*ral, Patrice stopped me at the door.
