Free Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home by Matthew Batt

didn’t hurt, of course, that he was going to be a doctor, and that he had a some land up in Shelby County near her hometown of Pendleton, Indiana. When he asked her to marry him, however, she said no.
    “He was good-looking enough, I suppose,” she said, “for the second son of a pig farmer.”
    Gram spun the ice in her glass and watched it whirl.
    “That was almost fifty years ago, if you can believe that.” She shook her head and held the empty glass. “Anyway, he asked for my hand.” She looked at the dark picture window, now covered with fluttering moths, and turned her mouth somehow both down and into a smile. “‘I don’t believe I care to’ is exactly what I said to that. I thought a very good deal of myself back then, as you might imagine.”
    She shook her head and looked into her glass.
    “But soon enough, well, everybody was joining the Army to improve their chances of staying stateside instead of being drafted and sent Lord knows where. Married couples got better picks and better accommodations, if you could call them that. They weren’t, it turned out. Smartest thing I ever did was to say no to that man. But I didn’t say it enough, now, did I?”
    She got up to close the shade on the picture window. “Not very nice of me to torment those poor moths,” she said, dropping the blind. “What they think they’re missing in here I’m sure I’ll never know.”
     
    Now, in the weeks after Gram’s death, something was wrong with my grandfather. He was not sleeping. He was losing weight. He was drinking more and more. And he was having a harder time urinating. “Probably that goddamned prostate,” he said over the phone. “There never has been any cure for getting old.”
    It wasn’t what we wanted, to lose both of them. But still, Mom and I felt an odd sense of relief. If Grandpa was really ill, surely the nonsense with his—former? current?—lover named Ruth would have to end. It was almost as if we could finally say, Thank God—now we know it can’t get worse.
    All our lives, my mother and I knew my grandfather through his obstinacy, his meaty silence. He was not an uncomplicated man. When he was called in to work or went out to fetch pralines and cream, my mom, my grandmother, and I spent much of the time trying to figure out what he was thinking, what he would say, what would make him talk.
    It was not entirely unpleasant. His words were simple and direct, and interpretation was generally uncalled for. He said what he meant, leaving little cause for wonder. I have inherited his sometime stoniness, and hear him through my reticence.
    That all changed after Gram died. Not with him and me: between us talk was business—good business—about school, about work, about books—but business nonetheless. Then, within days of Gram’s death, bouts of loquaciousness came over him. His thoughts were as odd as they were suddenly frequent—both because they were what they were, and because they were at all.
    One night, Grandpa, Bob, and I were waiting for my mom and Jenae to meet us at the Grandview Inn in Waukesha for dinner. It was two days after the funeral, and Jenae and I would be leaving for Utah soon. It seemed like a good idea to get out of the house. My mom had to do the flowers for somebody else’s funeral that afternoon, and Jenae went to help, so the three of us sat, womanless, at the bar. We ate pretzels and watched a recap of the Masters. There was nothing to talk about except when were Mom and Jenae going to get there. My grandpa ordered a second gin on the rocks—never a good sign.
    “Do you know,” he said, staring up at the TV, “how long it’s been since I had sex?”
    I thought I may have confused something Dick Enberg said on the overhead TV. Bob did not show any signs of hearing—which was not unusual: he too was an elderly man, only a handful of years younger than my grandfather. I looked at Grandpa. He was watching the TV. I looked at the TV. Golf. Nothing but golf.