AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You don’t tell people how you feel.”
“How do I start?” I ask. “Speaking up again.”
“You give yourself permission to make mistakes, Jesse. Trust that you will make mistakes again and that when you do, you’ll be able to come back from them. You deserve to come back from them.”
“That easy, huh?”
She laughs. “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
After Grandma died, Pop started spending more time in the garden. He’d never cared for flowers much until the woman who’d spent her life growing them stopped. Then he became an amateur botanist. He smiles at the bees buzzing around the flowers in the gardens around his care facility. He complains via faint muttering if I start to push the wheelchair too quickly. I slow as we come alongside a bed of happy, pink peonies. The stems seem to bend under the weight of the heavy blossom, but they never buckle.
He reaches out, so I stop. Pop cradles a thick blossom in his hand. “Your mom loves these,” he says. His voice is coarse from disuse. “We should get her some.”
I pat his shoulder. “Sure.”
He frowns, like he can’t quite place me. I smile but it doesn’t do much good. My face feels like plastic, the hard kind that’s brittle and easily cracks. I’m exhausted despite the nap I took after my night shift.
The doctors say to treat him like normal. To speak to him of the things I always would. “I’m going to start school in the fall,” I say as I push him toward a bench underneath a maple tree. I park his chair next to the bench and grunt as I take a seat beside him. I pass him the juice box one of the nurses sent us out with along with instructions not to litter.
“I just got a late acceptance as a mature student. Nursing. Like Grandma.”
Pop slurps as he finishes the juice box. “Trudy is the smart one,” he says. “I’ve only ever been good as a ladderman and on the farm.”
Pop grew up on a farm. He used to tell me all the usual tall tales. That he walked miles to school, uphill both ways. He had cereal boxes for shoes. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. They locked the teacher inside once and had an hours-long recess. I never knew which stories were real or fake, just that something, somewhere in each story was an embellishment. My grandparents were high school sweethearts, but she never saw him as just a farmer, just a ladderman. He was a hero to her, not because of his profession but because he’d go out late at night to get her favorite tub of ice cream when she had a bad day, or he rubbed her feet after a double shift at the hospital.
I might have let my silence ruin things with Lulu. But I’m not going to let it ruin things with him.
“I miss her,” I say and I mean my grandmother and Lulu. “I was mad at you for something you had no control over. I was mad at myself, too. Mostly at myself.”
The grass is still wet from rainfall early this morning. The building sits between this garden and the road, blocking the sound of traffic and the road construction. We’re in the shade here under the tree, but soon we won’t be.
“I kept something from you. It wasn’t for no reason. I was scared of what you’d say, what you’d think. But I’m ready now. I know who I am, and you deserve to know, too. I wish you could know.”
It takes saying it out loud to know that it’s true. Idoknow who I am. “Pop.” I take his hand. “I’m your grandson, Jesse, and even if you never know me by name again, I’m always going to be here. I’m a bisexual man in love with a woman and I hurt her because I’m scared. I wish you could tell me how to fix it. I’m not a firefighter anymore but I trust myself enough to make a new path.”
He pats my hand.
“I think you’d be proud of me.”
Pop smiles placidly, like “OK, strange boy.” We stroll down the path again on the way back to the facility for lunch. I stop to punch in the key code to open the doors.
“I wish you could have seen him,” Pop says, not to me; to himself, I think. His eyes are closed, his head tipped back. He reminds me of Betty, basking with the sun on his face. I should take him out more. He clearly enjoys it. “I think he was the first member of the Logan family to ever win a spelling bee.”
It takes a moment to register the memory that has gripped his mind. My fourth-grade spelling bee. “Recommend,” I say. “That was the word I won with. I can’t believe you remember that.”
Of all the things in the world—rugby matches, championships, shaking his hand at my probationary firefighter graduation—he remembers that. A nine-year-old kid who for the first and only time in his life remembered that there was only one C in “recommend.” “You and Grandma took me out for ice cream.”
“He’s so smart, Joey.” His moods change fast now and he’s lost his formerly white-knuckled control on his emotions. It’s a side effect of the disease, but seeing tears in my grandfather’s eyes will always create tears in mine.
“Thanks, Pop.” I kick up the brake on his chair to hug him, awkwardly hovering over him, trying not to use too much strength on his brittle body. He slaps my back, his palms still big, no matter what.
“I love you, son,” he says.
And now I can’t help but hug him harder. I get down on my knees and hold him to me. This whole time I’ve needed acknowledgment from him, understanding of who I am. I forgot the most important thing that I am to him. I am his son. In all the ways that matter, I’m his boy.
The shoulder of his sweater is wet with my tears. “I love you, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
