The Account My Grandfather Asked About

What I Always Believed

I want to explain what kind of family I thought I had grown up in, because none of what follows makes sense unless you understand how ordinary it all felt from the inside.

We were not wealthy. We were never wealthy. My father worked at the co op on Main Street most of my childhood, the same place my grandfather had worked for forty one years before he retired, and my mother did the church office books part time and helped run the school cafeteria during the years money was especially tight. We ate what we grew. We drove trucks until they had more rust than paint. Every August my mother sat at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of bills and said the same thing, in the same tired voice, the voice of a woman doing long division on money that was never going to come out even.

“There’s just nothing extra this year.”

I heard that sentence more times than I could count. I heard it about summer camp when I was eleven. I heard it about the class trip to the state capitol when I was fourteen. I heard it, with her hand on my cheek and real tears standing in her eyes, the year I dropped two community college classes because we had agreed, together, at that same kitchen table, that there was no way to keep paying for both tuition and the used car I needed to get to my shifts.

I believed every single word of it. Not because I was foolish, but because there was never a single reason, not one, to believe otherwise. My mother cried with me the year my car got repossessed. She sat up with me the night I called her crying from the parking lot of the community college, telling her I was probably going to have to withdraw for the semester. She held my hand at that same kitchen table and said the words that, looking back now, I understand were not comfort at all. They were cover.

“I wish there was something we could do, Caroline. I really do.”