Chronology of Estrangements

Leah Richards

1986-2018
In August of 2018, my grandfather, Sam, 84, was shot and killed in a drive by shooting in Baytown, Texas. His murder remains unsolved.

When I was a baby I could fit in your Stetson, and you told me that you were the only one who could shush my crying. There was magic between you and me. I carried this story with me as a badge, proof of our connection, well into adulthood before noticing that beneath this anecdote lurked a motive, the implication that the magic between us was a link that could be found through the virtue of your bloodline alone. All of my mother’s sleepless nights, her whispered songs and steady rocking, paled in the face of it.
          You and Shirley kept me almost every day of the week for the first three years of my life. Those days were remarkable in their simplicity. Shirley showed me off around the school cafeteria where she worked and you marched me through your garden, my hand gripped round your pinkie, toddling through green tomatoes and yellow okra flowers climbing tall, cicadas shaking in the pines. There are pictures of us in matching overalls, our foreheads close together. You are looking at the camera, and I am looking at you. It’s funny the things we remember. Your hands. I remember your hands.
          The first of our estrangements went like this, we were a family and then, so suddenly it happened, we were not.

1986: The new house that my mom, my brother, and I moved into had holes running through the porch, no heat in the winter and mewling stray kittens tucked into the junk pile out back. I remember discovering the kittens so clearly, all tabby fluff and six of them balled together. Palm-sized bodies who needed more than I needed. I was only four. In the aftermath of her divorce, my mother ran from Baytown, Texas to Lovelady. From the coast to the pines, a new city that sounded like a sweetheart’s wish, the irony being that she was broken-hearted with two babies in tow. The recollection of the kittens is one of the few things that remains clear in my mind. Here is a thing who needs more than I need. I cannot separate myself from them in the same way that I cannot disentangle myself from the rhythm of my grandfather’s footsteps marching through the wooded pathways of my mind. Through time and distance, they echo still.
          Looking back, my grandfather Sam always viewed himself as a father figure in mine and my brother Daniel’s lives, and he entrenched himself even further in the role after my parents’ divorce, a reckoning instigated by my father, Donnie’s, affair. Sam and Shirley were devastated. Divorce has become so commonplace, now, that I think we have collectively forgotten the revolutionary evolution of divorce in the 1970’s and 80’s. In 1969 Ronald Reagan signed the no-fault divorce bill in California, meaning that spouses did not have to prove wrongdoing to end their marriages. The rest of the states followed his lead, and divorce rates more than doubled for the next two decades. To the couples of the 1950’s, of which my grandmother and grandfather were a part, it must have felt like an apocalyptic end to the American family. It did not help that Donnie, their only son, did not seem interested in continuing a relationship with my brother and me. He was remarried and expecting a child with his new wife before the year’s end. Sam and Shirley did the only thing they knew how to do. If their son would not take responsibility in keeping his children connected to their blood family, then they would. Sometimes the things we hold most tightly to are the things already slipping from our grasp.

1990: My mother married the man that I call Dad in 1988. He is not my dad right away; that process is slower and comes with time. Donnie, my biological father, still visits occasionally, though not with any regularity. He appears like a jolt of electricity arcing from a sky free of clouds, leaving the hair on my arms standing at attention. The rules change when he is around, and although I am young, I can sense the shifting of expectations. As his visits grow to be fewer, I start to call my stepfather Dad. It feels good to do that, like things are normal. Imagine a lizard growing a new tail, a girl growing a new limb of a father.
          My brother and I visit Sam and Shirley during the summers. The two of them move from their suburban brick home in Baytown to a piece of property in the piney woods in East Texas. They still have a garden and a front porch swing. Shirley keeps chickens behind the house. There are fish in the pond out back, and Sam hunts for squirrels on his back acreage whenever he pleases. I am happy to be there with them, collecting warm eggs from underneath the hens and setting the hook of my cane pole to drag catfish as long and wide as my torso up the bank. Sam and I talk all the time, though it’s mostly his voice that I remember echoing through the pines. We ramble together. I am far from home, but I feel comfortable enough, the way kids do when they know they should feel at ease with someone, even when there lurks a whiff of the unknown aside their contentment. The first time that I call my stepfather Dad in front of Sam, he wastes no time. His grip falls so hard and fast on my shoulder that I look up to see what struck me, His thumb pinching down on the nerve in the hollow space between my collar bone. “Blood is thicker than water, girl.” He says through gritted teeth.
          This saying becomes one of my grandfather’s many mantras. He pulls it out like a dangerous coin from my ear. Every time I hear it, I tuck inward. I am an eldest daughter who loves rules and following them, but try telling a child, or anyone really, that they can’t think about their dad. As they recount their days, the past many months, the one person the child may not mention is their dad. Suddenly, the only thing I want to talk about is my dad leading me down a dirt path in east Texas with a picnic basket in hand. My dad showing me how to bottle feed an orphan calf in the warmth of our laundry room. My dad plucking at guitar strings in the sleepy light of our living room as the first frost blankets the roof.
          Maybe in Sam’s retelling of this same story, his face is not so tight to mine every time. Maybe it is real casual, little drops in a big, big bucket of childhood. When I think of my grandfather, though, “blood is thicker than water” rumbles through my chest the same way that he always called me girl. Those words became a part of us, and I think that he always meant for them to be. A reminder about who was blood and who was not.

1994: We come for summer and Christmas time to the little cabin in the woods. At Christmas there are blue ornaments on the tree and Shirley plays Elvis on the cassette player. My aunt, Kelly, is there, sometimes Donnie makes an appearance. There are presents wrapped in shiny paper with neatly tied silver bows. After the rest of the family has gone home, it’s just Daniel and me with Sam and Shirley. We play card games in the evening and every time that my hand beats my grandfather’s, he raps his knuckles on the table and laughs that long stack of staccato barks. So delighted that I think he must like me winning more than I do. Daniel is still small and nestled in Shirley’s lap when Sam starts to talk about a black man in the grocery store and that word my mother has told me never to say drops easy from his mouth. My grandfather is so casual that I think he must not know the rules of that word and how it hurts people. I’m so sure of his unawareness that I correct him. “Oh, you’re not supposed to say that word.” I say, or something like that. What comes next, I remember. Not the words from his mouth, but the card game slamming to a halt. Time slows and Sam’s face is red and so close to mine that I notice the spit gathering in the corners of his mouth as he screams at me not to tell him what to do in his own home. No one has ever yelled at me this close or with such venom, and I feel confused, like maybe he just still does not understand, so I try again. I regret it almost instantly. His fury only grows.
          The legacy here is a long one. I have great grandfathers, men who were old when Sam was young, whose graves are still swept clean by the daughters of the confederacy. There were always whispers that his eldest brother was an active member in the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, I knew nothing of my inherited legacy at the time. We have a way of doing that, hiding away those things that are uncomfortable to talk about in mixed company. Assuming that our closest kin already know all of the rules of how to be southern and poor, what it took to pull your bare feet out of the dust of a sharecropper’s field. Those rules that tell us who we are better than. Who we have to be better than so that we are better than someone.
          My grandmother leads me away from the table preparing my bath and helping me wash my hair while I cry great, heaving sobs. Sometimes now, when I watch my own children, their frantic backpedaling in the face of any minor disapproval, I remember this moment. How confusion about the thing can cause just as much hurt as the thing itself. Shirley adds extra bubbles to the tub and tucks me away to bed. Sam doesn’t speak to me until the drive to the Dairy Queen over the Texas line, the place where we always meet my mom. When he finally does speak, it is only to tell me goodbye.

1997: We are in Sam’s house for two weeks every summer. Every July Shirley buys a bucket of Double Bubble gum and turns the window unit on in the guest room. My grandfather saves a book or two for me and stocks bbs and shotgun shells for Daniel. Shirley trains the fish to come to the top of the pond out back whenever she shakes a can of cat food on the end of the pier. We are all delighted with each other, at first. Sam turns the lights off in the living room after lunch and we watch old westerns together. In the cool dark, he nods off in his recliner and we squinch our eyes shut tight when bad guys ride across the screen. A few days into our stay, however, my brother and I start to miss our mother.
          I imagine, now, that missing our mother was an affront to my grandparents, but particularly Sam, because it made him think about his son, my father, who, at the time was drinking too much and living in a trailer with aluminum foil on the inside of the windows. And because Sam is mad at both Donnie and my mother, my brother and I start to seem ungrateful as we make ourselves comfortable in his home. So that one night, when Daniel spills a bowl full of ice cream on the carpet, my grandfather leaps to his feet, fumbling with his leather belt, blue eyes flashing. I jump in front of my brother, and Shirley plants herself firmly between Sam and I with her hands on her hips. “You can’t hit us.” In the memory, the nickel taste of fear coats the back of my throat, and Sam seems bigger than in my other memories. His white shock of hair a wild contrast to the flush on his cheeks. “We’ll go home.” I am not threatening. I am afraid of what is to come. The possibility of losing them both. Shirley is pointing her finger at the screen door and telling Sam to get outside. In the cacophony, I watch his brow smooth, his icy blue eyes lose their gloss. He turns abruptly and heads to the porch outside, screen door slapping the frame. He doesn’t come back in until after we are asleep.
          Looking back, I think this is the turning point. The crook in the road where my grandfather realized that we were no longer his children, I was not the baby who’s crying only he could soothe. In those weeks and months away from them, I was growing different in a way that felt disrespectful. Dangerous. We were too far removed for Sam to change us back into something that he recognized, and as such, the splintering of ourselves begins.

The next few years run smoothly enough. I stick close to Shirley in my visits, and Sam takes Daniel out into the woods as often as he can. Daniel will tell me later in our lives that he always felt more connected to our grandfather than to other members of our family. I cannot say whether this is a result of his natural inclinations or a result of time and effort. That Sam valued Daniel more than me in the following years is certain.
          In our communications failure, the positive outcome is that we do not fight for a long time. I graduate high school, then college and Sam and Shirley are at every graduation event. I move to New Orleans and stay out late dancing, drinking, and performing with a local community theatre troupe whose focus is on social justice and racial equality. My days are spent running health care meetings for a nonprofit group whose focus is the same. I meet the man who will eventually become my husband one night two-stepping to a fiddle at The House of Blues in the French Quarter.
          Throughout these years, I still call when I can, though my visits taper off, as is the natural way of things as children grow old and older still. When I do call, it is Shirley who always answers. She tells me that she wishes I would call more. When I do visit, Shirley tells me that she wishes I would stay longer. I don’t recall Sam saying much. Only that something aches between us, like a bone healed over wrong.

2010: I am getting married in May. Our wedding will be in my parents’ backyard, and I am excited to have my dad walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. I know my grandfather will be angry. I call before I send the invitation to talk about it, break the news easy. I hear my voice hesitate when Shirley calls Sam to the phone. He doesn’t say anything at first, but when the wedding invitation I sent is not returned, I decide to call again, expecting Shirley to answer. To my surprise, she does not. It is Sam on the line. When I ask to speak with my grandmother, he tells me that she cannot come to the phone. Sam tells me that they will not be attending my wedding. He tells me, as he has told me so many times from that deep rumble down in his chest that “blood is thicker than water, girl.” If Sam is surprised that I hold firm in my decision, he doesn’t show it. This will be the first of our estrangements where we do not raise our voices. He does not send a gift, and we do not speak for the next two years, but then, Shirley starts forgetting things.
          At first it feels silly. The vegetables are in the dishwasher. Her purse in the washing machine. As my grandmother’s memory worsens, the two of them move back to Baytown to be closer to their children. The house in Baytown confuses Shirley further. She often finds herself lost when walking from the kitchen to the bedroom, and Sam takes to wedging chairs beneath door handles at night to keep her from wandering into the street. It is only when Shirley has a raging fever and is talking out of her head that she ends up at the hospital, a urinary tract infection. In the time between Shirley’s illness and their move to Baytown, my husband and I moved to Houston for his job. I see Sam for the first time in years when, after a call from my Aunt Kelly, I go to the hospital to visit Shirley.
          Shirley, who always sat next to me on the front porch swing, blowing big pink bubbles and talking for hours. Shirley who listened to all of my small frivolous stories and washed my hair in the bath. I’m certain it is clear to my grandfather that I am here for Shirley, but for the first time in a long time I feel things between us softening. Sam tells me in the hospital cafeteria how lost he feels, how his heart is broken over and over anew each day. When we sit together next to her bedside, I rest my hand on his arm, my fingers across his faded anchor tattoo. I listen and do not interrupt.

2013: I become a mother to my first child that June, a boy who I name Abel, after my dad. This crawls under Sam’s skin. I’m sure, at this point, it feels as if I am pushing buttons just to do it, but Shirley is in the nursing home now, and he doesn’t have time to think about much else. My grandfather spends every day visiting my grandmother, watching her slowly float away. She lives somewhere in the shadows, a deer startled into a forest so deep that no sun dapples the floor.
          Abel meets his great grandparents at Thanksgiving. Aunt Kelly has taken Shirley from the nursing home for the day to be with family. Shirley sits with her head down and picks around her plate. Sam is the only person at the table she knows anymore. She keeps sneaking silly faces at Abel, though, blowing kisses and reaching her hand out to touch his sweet smooth cheeks. I want to let her hold him, but when I ask, Sam tells me it’s not a good idea. Blood is thicker than water, I think to myself, as I place my baby boy in her arms. Shirley holds Abel and coos over him. He grabs her finger and coos back. Sam gets up and leaves the room until it is over. From the dining room window, I watch him walk the driveway alone. It’s funny the things we remember. My grandfather’s silhouette. I remember the back of his silhouette.

2014: Within the year, Jody’s job moves us back to New Orleans, again. We decide to go and visit Sam in Baytown once more before we are set to leave. Abel is learning how to scoot around. Mobile now, he crawls to his great grandfather’s feet and pulls himself up by Sam’s pants legs. Sam looks at him and does not pick him up. I put it off to my grandfather being nervous around babies, that was always Shirley’s territory anyway. I make chicken sausage gumbo in my grandmother’s now desolate kitchen, and after lunch I clean the dishes while Sam, Jody, and Abel go outside to visit the garden. I am caught off guard when, as we are leaving, my grandfather pulls me aside to tell me how disappointed he is.
          Sam tells me that the thing of it is the boy’s name, not of his blood. It’s an insult. He tells me that he could not bring himself to hold his great grandchild because of his name. I am struck dumb. I don’t remember what, if anything, I say back. Jody already has the car running. Sam waves from the driveway. This will be the last time we speak.

2018: It has been four years, our longest estrangement, when my aunt calls to tell me that my grandfather has been shot in a drive by shooting, a jarring act of seemingly random violence in his quiet suburban neighborhood, while on his morning walk. I cannot grasp the news at first. It seems so unfathomable that I wonder if I’m being scammed somehow, as if I didn’t recognize the voice across the miles. There was a car. License plates popped off. Windows blacked out. Multiple shots fired. Sam was hit twice. Two holes to the torso. One severed his spinal cord, snip. The other laid waste to internal organs. Snip. Sam’s stubborn spirit fought for two days after being life flighted to the best hospital in Houston. It is only after he is told that he will never walk again that the spirit succumbs.
          In the days that follow, Aunt Kelly will put her cell phone up to Sam’s ear and I will whisper that it’s ok to let go now to his to his barely conscious body, the same way I whispered love into Shirley’s ear, when she unexpectedly passed away in the nursing home, just months before. It feels strange that I would have the last words in our contentious battle of wills and that those words, ones lacking venom or anger, do not have reverb. They disappear into the rustle of bed sheets, a monitor’s beep.
          In the four years since our last exchange, I gave birth to a daughter and we moved, again with Jody’s job, this time from Louisiana to Abu Dhabi, in the Middle East. The sun always shines in the desert, and I am so far away from Baytown, Texas that it feels as if that life is a book I read once, many years ago. The bruises of my girlhood fade in the sun and the distance; blazing heat paints me a shimmering mirage.

It happens that we were a family, you and I, blood coursing and whooshing across the ages, beating like the steady drum of Sisyphus’ feet. No matter how many times we pushed at the boulder, it always came crashing back down. I think I know you better now, with time and distance. Can look with halting empathy at the man toiling in vain in the dirt and grime of our family histories. It is not that we did not choose love, it is that we chose love over and over again against our better judgment. There is bravery in that, but there is recklessness too.
          In the jolt of reality that is your death, I am struck by how our last estrangement ended in the same way that the first began. Both of us so suddenly parted, but this time for good. I believe, naively and without any organized religious thought, that the dead can send us signs, things like ladybugs, cardinals, and lucky pennies. I try to close the line of my mind to your afterworld, but I still find you. There you are in the wild laugh of my son, your cheeks blooming pink upon my daughter’s face. I see flashes of you in me, that same righteous temper, the same joy in play. Though I rein them both in, measured against a life’s worth of experience. I speak the apologies you could not give into the ears of my children. This, I think, is how we heal.

Leah Richards is a teacher and Writer-in-Residence with Writers in the Schools in Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared in: MER-Mom Egg Review, Hippocampus Magazine, The Nasiona, and Nailed Magazine. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University and is currently working on a collection of essays.

Next Up: We’ll Be Different by Haley Swanson