With all the bad moods, I guess it seemed natural that the house would have bad moods too. They just got worse and worse over time. Eventually, things escalated. Nobody really seemed surprised when one of those bad moods ended up with my grandfather dead.
Grandpap got into a fistfight with my father one time, but that didn’t kill him.
My mother threatened him with a knife another time when my dad wasn’t around, but everyone walked away from that incident too. It was the house that got him, and it should have been impossible, but I was there. I saw the whole thing. He came over one night and he wanted some earrings that his wife had given to my mom. He claimed that they were a loan, not a gift, and he was the one who had given them to my grandmother initially, so they were his to take back now that she was dead.
Mom didn’t give him anything, but she didn’t threaten him with a knife—not that time. She stood there, screaming and dialing the phone to tell my father to get home while Grandpap dug through her jewelry box, looking for the earrings. Mom had hidden them. I think maybe she knew that they weren’t hers to keep, so she had squirreled them away in a pill bottle in the medicine chest.
If Grandpap had asked me where they were, I would have told him just to get him to leave.
He was so angry when he couldn’t find the earrings that he threw the jewelry box on the floor and he left the bedroom, slamming the door behind himself. I was watching from my room through the door. Mom was yelling for him to get out. A wicked smile grew on his face and he said, “You know what? I’ll just take the rest of your cheap jewelry and I’ll trade them back when you remember where Dinah’s diamonds went to.”
I had seen them. I knew they weren’t diamonds. Grandpap was making that up so that even if she did give him back the earrings he could claim that it wasn’t enough. It was all a game.
At the time, I thought the house was mad at him for slamming the door. Now that I’ve thought about it more, I wonder if what happened was a kind of reflection or amplification of what he did. Maybe the house wasn’t really mad after all, but it was a like an echo chamber. If you shouted, your voice would come back two-fold. When he went to go back into the bedroom, the door came back at him two-fold. He threw it open, started to step through, and the door bounced back and hit him in the face before he could get his hand up. Grandpap staggered back and then kicked at the door. It looked like there was someone on the other side, pushing it back at him, but there was nobody in there.
The second hit made him fall and the third time the door hit him, it snapped his leg.
We all heard the bone break.
Mom actually laughed.
She must have thought that a broken leg was a good payback for his tirade. I knew the house wouldn’t stop until Grandpap was seriously injured. He started moaning and pulling at the leg of his pants. Mom took her time dialing the phone this time while Grandpap groaned and tried to pull up his pants leg. The door was still mostly closed, pressing on his broken bones. There was no blood that we could see. It was all leaking out inside his skin. It was swelling so fast that I could see his leg bulging out, pressing at the seams of his pant leg.
Dad got home just before the ambulance came.
Grandpap was out by then. Dad just said that he was playing possum. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, whispering, but I could hear them. I watched Grandpap the whole time. I knew he wasn’t playing possum, even though I barely knew what that meant at the time. Grandpap wasn’t playing at anything, I knew that much. His moans and groans had been real, and I could see the vein on top of his head that normally pulsed when he was mad. It got weaker and weaker. While Mom and Dad talked about what their story was going to be, the vein stopped pulsing completely. He was dead before the people arrived with their bags. Mom and Dad didn’t really have to worry about having their story perfect because there was nobody to contradict them. Grandpap didn’t have a say in it.
As far as I know, Mom and Dad never said a word about what actually killed Grandpap. It just didn’t come up. All of us knew that the house got angry sometimes, and if you slammed a door or kicked a wall, the house would find a way to get you back. You would trip going down the porch stairs or a cabinet door would swing open silently while you were bent over so you would slam your head when you stood up.
It was a normal part of life. Never occurred to me that other people didn’t have the same kind of problems.
# # #
Amber was silent for so long that Ricky thought the story was over.
The wind kicked up more and they settled deeper into the sand to keep warm. In the distance, the horses raced back north along the surf. Ricky wanted to ask a million questions, but he guessed that if he said anything she would never continue.
He waited.
By the time she spoke again, his eyes were beginning to drift shut.
# # #
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