AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His grandfather waved his hand to dismiss the conversation like he had so much when he didn’t want to throw people under the bus. “I’d ask how things are going with Mia, but since she got you a puppy and all and it’s your new best friend, I’d say things are good?”
“They are,” he said. “She’s at the house a lot.”
“But not as much as you’d like?”
His grandfather could always see through him.
“No,” he said. He looked at his watch and knew he should let his grandfather open up and started to help him get ready. “I think she found what I had in the closet upstairs.”
“What’s that?” his grandfather asked, turning to look at him.
Last week he’d been upstairs working out, he’d heard the clicking that she must have that one time and decided to just go check it out too. She was right, it did sound like a mouse.
He moved around the room, then into the closet and noticed the boxes had been moved. Not too obvious other than he kept things fairly organized.
When he looked at them closer, he knew which ones she was in. He didn’t think she was the type to go through his things but then noticed that only one on the bottom wasn’t sealed. She might have just seen it open and peeked.
“Some boxes from home.”
“Home meaning your parents’ home or my old house?”
“Mom and Dad’s,” he said. Though those boxes had been moved to his grandfather’s until he moved out.
“What did she find?” his grandfather asked. “I didn’t think there was much in there but things from school.”
“That was the box that was open,” he said.
“Does it bother you that she might have been snooping? I don’t picture her as the type.”
He explained what happened. “I don’t think she would have done it. She heard what she thought was a mouse and just kind of moved things out of the way to see if boxes had holes in them.”
“That sounds more like it. So what is the problem?”
“The video game system was in there,” he said.
“Oh,” his grandfather said. “I’m not sure why Jack was hell bent on getting that for you that year.”
He let out a sigh. “I think he just wanted to get me something that I asked for. Or finish something Mom had begun. But nothing was going to make that a happy Christmas.”
He’d been devastated when he opened the game and wished he could have held it back when his father got upset. That night, his father got drunk and he blamed himself for that too.
Maybe if he’d shown how happy he was to get it, his father wouldn’t have felt the need to hide in his room and drink himself to sleep. He often wondered if that was what started his father’s drinking spree.
“No,” his grandfather said. “People do things in grief without thought. Or they don’t think it through enough. It’s nothing more than that. I guess the bigger question is, why did you keep it? Why not give it away?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “To this day I’m not sure why I’ve got it in the house.”
“Because it’s a memory you can’t bear to get rid of. Even a bad one. The same reason you’ve made every decision in your life. You think of your parents and they drive your choices. When are you going to think of you and what you want?”
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means that everything you’ve done has been to make them proud. To do what they would have liked. To help out a friend of theirs.”
“There isn’t anything wrong with that,” he argued. “Not everything I’ve done has been for their friends. They’ve been mine too. People my parents never knew.”
“You’re right,” his grandfather said. “But they are still your driving force. I just wait for the day when you do something that was different than what they did or had.”
“I’ve got a dog,” he said.
