Apparently, I had been born without nerves.
Chloe attended an expensive private university several states away.
My parents had been divorced for years by then, but Brenda insisted on financing the experience Chloe “deserved.”
There were tuition loans.
Private education loans.
Credit cards.
Trips.
Sorority expenses.
Study-abroad costs that somehow included weekends in Monaco.
Chloe studied art history.
There is nothing wrong with art history.
The problem was that Chloe seemed considerably more interested in photographing herself beside art than building a career around it.
She spent summers in Europe with wealthy friends.
She posted photographs from rooftop bars in Barcelona, beaches in Greece, vineyards in Tuscany, and restaurants where dinner probably cost more than Grandpa spent feeding himself for a month.
Meanwhile, Grandpa aged.
Chloe still loved saying she was “Grandpa’s girl.”
She just rarely visited Grandpa.
Thanksgiving.
Christmas.
Her birthday.
Sometimes Easter.
And, with remarkable consistency, the beginning of semesters when tuition balances came due.
Grandpa never publicly complained.
He would hug her.
Give her food.
Ask about school.
Slip her money when she claimed she was struggling.
Then she would leave.
I noticed.
He noticed too.
I just did not know how much.
The lake house was where Grandpa and I became close.
Calling it a lake house barely described it.
The property sat on ten wooded acres in Maine, at the end of a narrow gravel road surrounded by pine, birch, and maple.
The house itself was four bedrooms, heavy timber construction, fieldstone chimney, broad back porch, and windows facing a deep-water cove.
Grandpa had designed it before I was born.
He did not merely hire people to build it.
He worked on it.
There were beams in that house he had planed by hand.
The stone fireplace contained rocks he collected from the property.
The dining table had been built from maple cut after a storm brought down three trees near the driveway.
A shallow gouge remained on the pantry door because I lost control of a pry bar when I was sixteen.
Grandpa refused to let me replace it.
“That mark cost you a thumbnail,” he said. “That’s history.”
At the lake house, I learned how to fish.
How to repair an outboard motor.
How to split firewood without burying an axe in the dirt.
How to make coffee strong enough to frighten normal people.
When the dock began rotting, Grandpa and I rebuilt it over one miserable humid summer.
Mosquitoes ate us alive.
We dropped two boards into the lake.
I smashed my thumb.
Grandpa laughed until he almost fell off the unfinished dock.
Years later, when his health began deteriorating, that house became quieter.
The last two summers, he could no longer handle serious work.
I did it.
I replaced sections of roof flashing.
Repaired the generator.
Painted trim.
Cleared fallen trees.
Fixed plumbing.
Sometimes Grandpa sat in a chair on the porch and directed me.
Sometimes he slept.
Sometimes he just watched the lake.
Maya came with me whenever her nursing schedule allowed.
Grandpa adored her.
That mattered enormously because Maya was the opposite of the kind of woman Brenda expected me to marry.
Maya grew up moving through foster homes.
Some were decent.
Some were not.
She left the system at eighteen with two suitcases, less than three hundred dollars, and absolutely no family safety net.
She worked overnight shifts at a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, cleaned offices on weekends, and waited tables while completing nursing prerequisites.
Eventually she became a pediatric nurse.
She never complained about money.
When I proposed, she was the person who suggested a prenuptial agreement.
“I don’t ever want anyone saying I married your business,” she told me.
I thought it was unnecessary.
She insisted.
Brenda still called her calculating.
Grandpa called Maya tough.
From him, that was a love letter.
When Grandpa died, I thought grief would be the hardest part.