by H. A. Fleming

We stood there for a while before I rang the doorbell. My grandfather's wife answered. I never knew what to call her. She told us to call her Helen, but my cousins called her Grandma.

My grandfather didn't come to greet us. Off in the den, we could hear the faint sound of his golf game and the clinking of the ice cubes in his glass of Scotch.

"Harold! Come in here and say hello," she said, and giggled, touching her fingers to her pearl necklace. I hated the way she laughed.

She would shake her head, and squint up her eyes. My mother said she probably laughed like that when she was a cheerleader fifty years ago and someone had told her it was cute so she did it ever since.

When my parents and little brother went in the den I wandered around the house.

I tiptoed through the dark hallways, past the locked doors, into the kitchen. I looked at the refrigerator and ran my fingers over the pictures held up by magnets from places like Paris and Nantucket. I looked and looked, past rows of soccer pictures of my cousins and all of her grandchildren whose names I never knew. There was never a picture of me.

The day before we went to visit, my brother asked to go to the library to get a book of jokes. He picked out one about golf. From the kitchen I could hear his voice, tiny and earnest.

"Grandpa, Grandpa, do you want to hear a joke?"

"Go ahead."

"Why does a golfer wear two pairs of pants?"

"Why?"

"In case he gets a hole in one!"

"Why don't you tell me one I haven't heard," my grandfather said and snorted.

"We should get going," my mother said.

"In a minute," my father said.

On the way home in our old yellow Fiat, my mother began to yell and slam her fist on the dash. I tried not to hear and just watched the houses that were so much bigger than ours flash by, and rested my forehead on the cool glass. My brother looked pale next to me, frightened by my mother's tears.

My mother screamed at my father, a story I had heard before. About how he hadn't said anything on their wedding day when my Grandfather punched her, a poor Irish-Catholic atheist, in the stomach as she came down the stairs of the church. He had done it because he thought she was pregnant, but I was over six years away.

My father said nothing. Even when they fight, his eyes stay calm and stare straight ahead.

When we got home and my mother was tucking me into bed I whispered, "Why doesn't Grandpa take our coats or get us drinks, like he does for everyone else?"

She turned and stared at my father standing silent in the doorway and said, "We are never going back."

But that, too, I had heard before.