“Damn straight.” I palm her ass, enjoying her giggles. She’s been down recently. It’s good to hear her laugh. I wrap my arm around her waist and guide her outside. Once we’re buckled in, I take a deep breath and pull out of the driveway.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” she asks.
“Back to the beginning, where it all started.” I reach out and take her hand in mine. “You want me to open up, spill my guts. I’m more a man of action than speech. So, I’m going to show you. This time around, it’s me trusting you.”
I take us thirty minutes away to the run down house in the shady part of town and park my car. “This is where I lived for the first five years of my life with my mom and dad. Back then, it was a decent neighborhood full of working class people. My dad had issues, but he kept a steady job. My mom st
ayed at home with me, when she wasn’t on a bender or running the streets. My father’s parents spent a lot of time watching me. I guess it made sense I ended up with them in the end. Mom was originally from Arizona, so visits to her side were few and far between. I don’t think they got along really. Everything about her is hazy. They never reached out after the incident. She was their only child, and I think it hurt them too much to see the path she’d gone down. This is also the place where my father took her life before taking his own by swallowing a shotgun shell.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s an ugly thing. Mental illness runs in our family. The trend seems to be it skips a generation. My grandfather’s mom had it, but he was fine. Then his son had it, and I’m fine.”
She squeezes my arm.
“Now, you see my concern with junior,” I say.
“Concern is one thing. What you have going borders on paranoia.”
“Yeah, you’ve said it a time or ten.” I massage my scalp through my beanie.
“What happened…after the murders?”
“I went to my grandparents’ home, which is our next stop.” I pull away from the curb, eager to be away from the home that to me was as evil as Amityville. A chill races down my spine. We were resurrecting ghosts I wasn’t fully ready to lay to rest.
The house is a twenty-minute drive. Warm memories fill me as I pass familiar landmarks. The gas station where I used to ride my bike to get ice cream treats. The park I used to play in. The church we attended every Sunday. My grandparents were good people with a strong work ethic and plenty of faith.
I pull up to the ranch style stucco house with the perfectly manicured lawn and a white picket fence. The shutters are the same teal blue my grandmother loved so much.
“This is beautiful.”
“Thank you, it’s the same way they left it.”
“Do you own this?” she asks.
“I never had the heart to sell it after I inherited, and living in it didn’t seem right either. This is where I learned everything I know. How to be a man. A good one. Work ethics and morality. My grandfather was amazing. He knew how to build things, fix things, and earned a living as an electrician at a local private company.”
“Did he teach you how to do all of this too?” she asks.
“He did, but my heart was never in it. I had no desire to follow in his footsteps. He wasn’t angry about it. He said every man had to find his own way in this world.”
“Sounds like a wise caring man.”
“He was.” I turn to her. “Do you want to go inside? I have a cleaning person and a lawn person to keep things from going into disrepair.”
“How far do you think this is from the clubhouse?” she asks.
“About fifteen, twenty minutes by bike,” I say.
“All this time you were in their backyard.”
“Yeah, kind of ironic how things happen when they’re supposed to.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asks.
I study her face. I realize that if she’d come along earlier in my life, I would’ve butchered this relationship. “Yeah, I do. Come on.”
We climb out of the car and make our way up the walk. I can imagine my grandparents sitting out in the rocking chairs on their porch, the way they used to. A pitcher of sun tea would rest between their chairs, as they’d watch the world go by.