“I’ve been thinking about what you told me,” my mother said on the phone, “about what you said your grandfather did to you when you were 5? I have been racking my brain and I just can’t accept it.”
My heart went cold. I shut off all emotion.
“I remember when I was a little girl,” Mom said, “I saw these green reflective glasses glowing in my window at night. The bogey man had a long coat and a hat and he wore a Dick Tracy hat low over his eyes. When I started to cry, my daddy would come to my bed and comfort me. I don’t know if it was a dream or what. That’s all I can remember.”
He always wore a fedora. I knew my grandpa was the bogey man but I didn’t dare speak of it when I was young. Partly because I wished it wasn’t true, but mostly because I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me. Grandpa wasn’t the only one to break my heart, just the first one, the one I loved the most. That’s why he haunted my thoughts so.
“Don’t worry about it. Just forget about it,” I said. My mother is fragile and I am always protecting her.
I remembered one dawn in my teens, Grandpa was in the kitchen making coffee while I lay shaking on the couch in the dark front room, wrapped in one of my grandmother’s quilts. My mother tiptoed in from the guest room and lay with me, holding me tight. She knew.
After my grandma died, it became apparent that the old man was senile. Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t recall the names of his own children some days. The day he forgot how to drive home, the police called my mother. She asked me to pack up his things and bring him down to her house.
He had no idea who I was. He didn’t know where we were going. His mind a peaceful, blank slate and he fell against my shoulder and snored loudly as I drove. The three hairs on the dome of his shiny skull repulsed me.
“Did you remember to bring his photo album?” My mom asked. She wanted to sit with her father and look at family pictures, help him remember.
“No, I’m sorry, Mom. I clean forgot.”
It was true.
