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4
LILY
My grandpapa’s house in Cobble Hill is literally the only home I’ve ever known. All the key milestones from my life either happened there or were celebrated or cried over there. I know how the trees in the front yard look in every season. I know our neighbors’ names and wave at them when I go out to run. A few of those neighbors have lived on our street for long enough to see me grow up and graduate high school, then finish at NYU.
So, yes, sometimes I’ve found it a little stifling. Sometimes, when I’m overtired from studying, I’ve daydreamed about making a reckless, free-spirit move and letting the universe find me somewhere else to be from.
But at the end of the day, the three-story former row house—it’s not attached to other houses any longer—and its detached garage and its trees in the yard meant safety. They meant stability.
They meanthome.
It feels unspeakably bizarre to pull up to the curb in an Uber only to discover that it’s not the same house I left the other night.
It looks the same. Nothing has changed about the pristine white siding or the summer light filtering through the leaves or the neat pattern of the stone retaining wall around our yard. It’s still a gorgeous house.
It’s the way I feel about it that’s changed.
It’smewho’s changed.
I don’t trust it anymore. The house didn’t do anything wrong. It sheltered me from the elements and gave me a safe place to have a childhood and everything a house is supposed to do.
Jameson’s words echo in my head.
Single guy with one daughter, maybe more, works his way up at a firm, becomes a prosecutor…and buys himself a mansion in Cobble Hill on a prosecutor’s salary.
The Uber driver puts the car in park. We do the dance of thanking each other, and I climb out onto the sidewalk with my cheap convenience store smartphone in my hand and my bag hooked over my shoulder. The driver cranes his neck to glance at me, like I might’ve changed my mind about being dropped off here. For a split second, I feel like I’m falling, like I’ve missed the hold on my suspended hoop.
I put on a big, bright smile and wave the driver away. The Uber trundles through the neighborhood and disappears around the corner, leaving me in peace on the sidewalk.
A shiver like a ripple on water moves down my spine. There’s only so long I can stand out here, pretending to be deep in thought, before the neighbors will notice, so I turn to face the yard.
I can almost hear Jameson.
Fancy house for a self-made man.
In the grand scheme of things, I didn’t spend very long at Jameson’s cabin. The length of time doesn’t seem to matter. My grandpapa’s house looks almost obscenely large from the street. The two of us couldn’t possibly have needed that much space.
I know that when we were in the world’s shittiest apartment trying to keep each other alive, he was getting a good night’s sleep in his house in Cobble Hill.
It just doesn’t sound like something my grandpapa—the man who raised me—would do. The man I know would never have sold out a family of orphaned children to fund his lifestyle, and he didn’t have to. We didn’t need to live in a house like this.
“I still don’t have all the facts,” I tell the house.
I absolutely believe that Jameson and his siblings were hurt in exactly the way he described. I don’t doubt he believed what he said about my grandpapa.
But there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head that repeats, over and over,don’t you owe your grandfather the benefit of the doubt?
I owe him a conversation, if nothing else.
If Grandpapa is who Jameson said he is, then he’s hidden it remarkably well for as long as I’ve known him.
And…I’d be lying if I said a tiny part of me wasn’t holding out hope. Yes. The few days I spent with Jameson opened my eyes. Not just to the reality of men, or of Jameson, but ofme.I’ve spent months—years, maybe—ignoring the sinking feeling I got whenever I thought about law school and the distinguished career that would most certainly follow. I told Jameson that I thought it was reasonable to reevaluate, and that’s still true.
Whichmeanstaking a more in-depth look at…
Everything.
Becausemostof the reason I wanted to be a lawyer, and a judge, was that Grandpapa made the world a better, more just place.
