June sat on a blanket wearing yellow socks.
Chloe dug the hole badly.
I told her Grandpa would have had at least six suggestions.
“Seven,” she said.
“He’d hate this shovel.”
We laughed.
Then I cried without warning.
Chloe put down the shovel.
She didn’t tell me he was in a better place.
She didn’t tell me to be grateful.
She just stayed.
Later, after she took June inside, I sat on the porch with Grandpa’s letter.
The moving truck had come back to me in dreams for months.
But lately, I dreamed about other things.
His crooked sandwiches.
The strawberries.
The sound of sandpaper while I fell asleep upstairs.
For seventeen years, I had understood my life as a story about being abandoned.
Then my parents returned, and I thought it would become a story about making them pay.
Grandpa, impossibly, had left room for something else.
