18.
I could mark the house by a stand of lonely silos in the distance, blank faced with black holes for eyes. I didn't like how they looked, no one ever home but the dark birds wheeling circles above them, waiting for a spot to land. I didn't want to think about those things. When we got close enough the house would appear too, just in time.
We pulled in on the gravel drive and he crunched out in his boots, opened the car door and said, At last, another living voice! From then the house was filled to the roof with living voices, and even my grandma talked and laughed. Because children require things.
We'd have the cushions thrown off the couch and a game started that could last all weekend before dinner even made it to the table. There was plenty of everything to go around, all prepared at once and no way to pick a favorite. Three kinds of pie too, and the promise of another little something before bed.
Politics and shushing, second helpings and usually Grandpa cussing before we were done, and a baby sitting high up on the Bible to reach it all.
She'd lost all of her own children except one, and it didn't occur to me that we could never fit in that hole exactly. Perhaps she didn't say much because it doesn't matter if you talk about some things or not. They never go away.
More than once Grandpa told me how it was his fault, that 50 dollars hadn't been enough to fix her teeth so they decided to just get rid of them altogether. But she was pregnant when they put her under and pulled them out. When that baby didn't live he was left holding the reason for the rest of his life.
She never told me the story at all.
Instead, she sewed it and grew it and scrubbed it and cooked it and served it for everyone in the house, then got up and did it again the next day. At night, she took out her teeth and brushed them while answering anything in the world I could think to ask. Then into a glass on the counter.
Now get to bed.
Grandpa had nothing but stories, every one told hard as scratches in the dirt. He did things like throw us in the back of the pickup, untethered and without our jackets. He'd haul us out to look at a piece of land or check on sheep, not quite managing to outrun the rain. Just like we weren't the most precious thing in the universe, except that he put up with us to begin with, which meant we were. He didn't put up with much.
Sometimes he'd catch hell when we got home, but if there was one thing we knew it was that we were in the safest place on earth. It was the reason we always begged to stay. Nothing to think about, if you didn't want to. Plus there was someone nearby who knew everything.
This was the way kids were meant to feel.