The Christmas My Father Threw Grandpa Out

“Get him out of my house,” he said, and then, quieter, meaner, the words he probably thought the wind would swallow before they reached me, “and don’t bring him back until he can act like a person.”

The door shut. Through the frosted glass panel beside it I could see the shapes of everyone still sitting at the table, the candlelight moving, and I heard, muffled but unmistakable, someone asking what all the noise had been, and my father’s voice answering, easy and light as if he had not just put his own disabled father out into a snowstorm.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just cleaning things up.”

I stood on that porch for a full ten seconds not feeling the cold at all, which I have since learned is not bravery, it is just shock, doing the thing shock does, keeping you warm a little longer than any coat would. Then I felt it all at once, the wind cutting straight through my sweater, and I knelt down in front of my grandfather’s chair and tucked the blanket around his knees with hands that were already going numb.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His lips had gone pale at the edges. “I’m sorry, Laura. I don’t know why I can’t keep my hand steady anymore.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” I told him, and I meant it more fiercely than I have meant almost anything in my life. “Nothing. Do you hear me?”

I pounded on that door once, hard, with the side of my fist, and called through it that he could not stay outside, that it was fifteen degrees and dropping, and I got nothing back but the sound of glasses clinking and somebody’s laugh, too bright, too deliberate, the sound of a room agreeing together to pretend nothing had happened. So I stopped pounding, because I understood, faster than I wanted to, that nobody on the other side of that door was going to open it, and every second I spent trying was a second my grandfather sat getting colder.

I pushed his chair down the driveway myself, my boots slipping on the packed snow, my car parked at the curb because Tina did not like wheelchairs blocking the garage. I got him into the passenger seat, folded the chair into my trunk, and drove the mile and a half to my apartment with the heat blasting and my grandfather’s hands, when I checked them at a red light, gone the color of skim milk.

My apartment is small, the second floor of a converted house on Willow Street, and that night, as if the universe had decided one cruelty was not quite enough, the heater made two weak clicking sounds when I turned the thermostat up and then went silent. I got Frank onto the couch, piled every blanket I owned onto him, put the electric kettle on for tea, and knelt in front of him rubbing his hands between mine until they warmed enough that his color came back.