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Show was not the start of something. The conversation had begun long ago. Only looking back, can I put two and two together and come up with something that resembles four. The tractor happened. My grandpa ran his hands over my flat chest while my parents dressed my brothers in the house and my grandma shucked another batch of corn. Less clear is what happened months before that when they came to Virginia and watched my brothers and me while my parents went to the Bahamas. That week is an empty space in my past, akin to the moment I fell from the couch, a yawning gap. Only when I woke that time, I stopped going to school. My grandfather was an abuser, physically, sexually, emotionally. In many ways, the military kept me safe from his reach, never allowing the kind of intimacy real violence requires. For decades, he passed as a man with good business sense and a temper. When the truth came out, it almost suffocated us. His death in the early 1980s, only weeks after he walked into the spare bedroom while I slept in the hide-a-bed under the guns, his hands furiously plumbing the air, demons flying from his lips, fractured stories long held inside. When he died we had just returned to Virginia, I had just started high school, and Grandma still drove the bus. The news came while I was at first aid class learning to be a candy striper. Even before my grandpa's funeral, his body cold for a day, possibly at the same time that we drove once again from Virginia to Nebraska without stopping, another thirty-six hour trip, sleeping on the floor of the Caravan, my parents switching drivers without even pulling over on the interstate, my father scratching his arms until they broke open in fields of blood, wearing a ring with a maroon stone I had never seen before, one 98 |