They brought their furniture, their favorite mugs, their old photo albums and recipes and the smell of my childhood back with them. My grandpa turned the spare bedroom into “his office,” which mostly meant a desk piled with crossword puzzles and Red Sox schedules. My grandma claimed the kitchen and the yard and my bedtime routine.
A year after Mom died, the three of them—Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad—made a plan.
They bought a bigger house together. The house.
Four bedrooms. Enough space for all of us. Title in my grandparents’ names because they had the money and the credit and the old-school “we’ll take care of it” mindset. The idea was simple: we’d live there as a three-generation family. They’d help raise me. Dad would get his feet under him again.
It worked.
For a while, anyway.
Two years after my mom died, Dad went to a business conference in Chicago.
He almost didn’t go. I heard Grandma pushing him into it.
“You can’t just sit in that office forever, Mark,” she’d said. “Go. Meet people. Get out of your own head for a weekend.”
So he went.
He came back with a tan, a stack of business cards, and a woman named Tracy.