Barefoot and still in her nightgown, my mother comes into my kitchen at lunchtime and looks down the steps to the family room. Her eyes are swollen and red, as they have been for all the weeks since my father’s death. My four-year-old, the youngest, is playing on the wooden floor alone. He is pushing small metal cars off the bottom step and watching them crash into each other. This game requires all his concentration. He seems to have some plan for the shape the wreckage must take. He does not hear, or at least does not acknowledge, his grandmother. “Hi, honey,” she says.
“Hi, Wibby,” he says, not looking up. Then, “Granddaddy played cars with me.”
Whenever my mother told this story in the years to come, it was meant to be an example of how God had made a terrible mistake. It was another reason in the long list of reasons she always marshaled for why, if she and my father could not have gone into the next world together, then at least she should have been the one to go first. Confirmation that a bad bargain had somehow been struck.
But my four-year-old’s remark was not a rebuke. It had nothing to do with her. He was a little boy, and he was still finding out all the places where his grandfather had been but would be no longer. This new absence was a missing tooth, the hole he couldn’t help probing with his tongue. His grandfather had played cars with him. His grandfather had read books to him. His grandfather had walked around the block with him, holding his hand.