I began asking something else.
“Was I bad?”
Grandpa was washing a saucepan when I said it.
He turned off the water.
Then he dried his hands very carefully, as though whatever happened next required all of him.
“No.”
“Mom said I ask too much.”
He knelt in front of my chair.
“Listen to me, Clara.
Needing to be loved is not asking too much.”
I didn’t believe him immediately.
Children believe the people who leave before they believe the people who stay.
Leaving looks so much like proof.
But Grandpa was patient.
He packed lunches with crooked sandwiches.
He learned to braid from a library book, and my first school photograph featured a hairstyle that looked like it had survived a small electrical fire.
He sat through school concerts wearing his hearing aids even when they whistled.
When I got my first period, he stood in the supermarket aisle holding his phone while our neighbor Mrs.
