Page 104 of Bound to Burn


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I step into the kitchen, setting my keys on the counter. Grandma Jo is just finishing up dinner; a pot of noodles simmers on the stove, the steam being pulled into the fan. Everything seems so normal, and yet nothing will ever be the same.

When she turns around and sees my face, she knows. I can’t seem to look at her without wondering if anything she told me about my mom was the truth.

“Why would you lie to me?” I ask, every ounce of pain I’m feeling is evident in my voice.

Grandma Jo’s smile falters, replaced with lines I’d never noticed before, almost as if the pain inside of her is trying to seep out through the cracks.

“You packed away all of her things.” I place my hands on the counter. “Was it because you didn’t want me to find out about her and Peter? Why?”

“You know how hard losing Maggie was for us. Why do you want to dig up the past?” she pleads.

“I spent my whole life thinking he was a horrible person, that he had a daughter he didn’t care about, but he didn’t even know about me.” My body sags with emotion, heavy, and consuming.

“Hewasa horrible person,” Grandma Jo says defensively. “You don’t know him. You don’t know the kind of person he was.” The pain of losing a daughter fills the small space of the kitchen.

A kitchen my mother once ran through on her way out to the pasture.

A kitchen where my grandmother made her breakfast before sending her off to school.

A kitchen where she ate her last meal before running away to L.A. with Peter.

A kitchen where my heart breaks for all of us.

“I don’t know him because you kept him from me.” My words impact her like the force of a physical object.

“He took my daughter from me!” Each word is emphasized as if I don’t already know she’s gone.

Every day I live with the knowledge that my mother was taken from me too soon.

Grandpa John walks through the back door and looks between us. He pulls the hat from his head and sighs deeply.

“He didn’t deserve to know her,” Grandma Jo tells him, and he understands who she’s referring to, an unspoken acknowledgement.

He must have known this day was going to come one way or another.

“Jolene,” Grandpa Johns says sympathetically, as if they’ve had this conversation too many times to count, and neither of them wins.

He rubs the grey hair on top of his head in frustration, and she turns away from us, leaning against the sink and staring out into the pasture. The noodles forgotten and boiling water billowing over the range.

“It’s hard on your grandma, Sunshine,” he tries to explain, sliding his eyes to his wife.

“This is hard on me, too,” I tell him. My voice is strong, but inside I’m crumbling.

All I want are answers so I can make my own decisions.

Grandpa John shifts his weight, setting his hat on the hook by the door. “We thought that since you didn’t know any better and you had us, you weren’t missing out on anything,” he explains.

I do understand, but it doesn’t make me feel any better that I was hidden from Peter. It feels dishonest, like I am a stolen piece of property.

“I wish you had been honest with me.” I don’t say that I wish they’d been honest with Peter, but the unknown can be scary sometimes. There are so many what ifs.

“Your grandma thought she was protecting you,” he tries to explain. “We both did.”

He scratches his chin while his eyes meet mine. “You were just a baby when Maggie died, and you were all we had.”

In my peripheral I can see Grandma Jo start to wash the dishes as if to distract herself, but she can hear every word, reliving these painful memories.

“We figured Peter either didn’t know about you or didn’t care. We weren’t going to go out of our way to give him the opportunity to take you away from us. Either way, you were the only thing that made losing Maggie bearable.”

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