Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Debra Gwartney
(my grandmother’s air of gloom quickly drawing in women who’d
take care of her, soothe her), they were invited to join the Thursday
picnic group and monthly dinner club and church societies and
philanthropies. My more raucous paternal grandparents were not.
When my father mentioned recently that Grandpa Ron could “put
away the liquor like nobody else,” I refused to believe it. Grandpa Bob
is the one I remember coming in stumbling loud from the bars late at
night (though at age forty-five he quit and hasn’t had a drink since).
Over on the other side of the river, the whiskey on Grandpa Ron’s
breath was faint and reassuring.
When I was around, Grandpa Ron asked about my friends and
school like he meant it, an inquiry that wouldn’t have happened at
the Gwartney house. That family instead had reassuringly ordinary
conversations about things like hunting, basketball scores, and how
much potato salad to order from the IGA before the delivery boy went
home. My father and his father took my brother into the hills to shoot
at cans, and down to the shop to measure horse trailers and wheel
wells. Grandpa Ron took me, as well as my brother and sisters, for
rides in his motorboat, trout fishing, and let me sit on the press as
he single-fed the latest issue of the newspaper through giant rollers.
I also noticed how he avoided my father—the dispute between them
was long and, to me, mysterious. A mystery, that is, until I could
do the math and figure out that my dad was a sophomore in high
school when he got my mom pregnant, a boy too stubborn to let his
new wife’s father help or advise. No interference, even of the kindest
variety, was allowed in my father’s house. So I found it was best not to
bring up how comforted I felt by my maternal grandfather, especially
around my dad.
And my mom—she quietly counted on her father in a way she
couldn’t have explained to anyone, not before she became a teenage
mother and not after. Nor could she have explained to me that day
of our standoff over Grandpa’s viewing that grief comes out looking
exactly like anger. In the first days after his death, she was a cannon
about to blow and, without discussion, she and I worked out what to
do with her rage. She needed someone to be mad at and there I was,
willing to make her mad. I’d refused to go along to the viewing both
because I truly didn’t want to see my grandfather dead, but also so she
could distract herself from his death by becoming thoroughly pissed
about how I’d let her down.
“This is the hardest day of my life,” she yelled down the stairs. She
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