“Grandpa, it’s yours.”
He looked at me.
“I already know I was here.”
He closed my fingers around it.
“You didn’t.”
I still have that piece of wood.
Grandpa lived fourteen months after our Hawaii trip.
He made it to 103.
Near the end, he moved into my home.
One evening, I found him sitting beside the window with the old photograph of Ruth.
He had become very weak.
“Thinking about Hawaii?”
“Thinking about your grandmother.”
I sat beside him.
“Do you regret not going back sooner?”
He thought for a while.
“No.”
That surprised me.
“Really?”
“I would’ve liked to.”
He looked at me.
“But if I’d gone at forty, Ruth might’ve been busy raising children.”
He smiled.
“At sixty, maybe I would’ve missed Leilani.”
His eyes moved toward the photograph.
“At eighty, maybe the hotel hadn’t found everything.”
Then he squeezed my hand.
