Go Find It
What Grandpa left Angelica looked like nothing. That was the point.
Every morning at five o’clock, without variation, I would hear him in the kitchen. The particular sound of his footsteps, unhurried and deliberate, the soft clunk of the coffeemaker finding its rhythm, and then the quiet metallic snap of the lunchbox closing. That snap was the sound the morning made to announce itself in our house for as long as I can remember. He would carry the box out to his truck in the dark, and I would listen from my bed to the engine turning over, and then I would fall back asleep the way children fall back asleep when they know the house is in order and the person responsible for it is doing what they have always done. I am Angelica. I am twenty-five years old, the youngest of five, and for the better part of my life that lunchbox was simply part of the background of my grandfather, as unremarkable as his reading glasses or his particular coffee mug. I did not understand what it was for until I was sitting on a park bench three days after his funeral, opening it with shaking hands, trying not to cry in public and failing.crsaid
My parents died when I was two. A truck ran a red light on a Tuesday evening in October and that was the end of them. I was in the back seat in my car seat and I survived, which is a fact I have carried my entire life with the specific weight of something you did not choose and cannot put down. My grandfather, Walter, stepped in without being asked. He was in his mid-fifties then, and he took five children into a small house and raised us on a factory worker’s salary and whatever he could manage with careful hands and a ledger he kept at the kitchen table on Sunday evenings. He was not a soft man in the way people describe soft men, the kind who says everything he feels and wears his heart close to the surface. He was soft in a more durable way, the way certain kinds of wood are described as forgiving: he bent where bending was right, and he held where holding was necessary, and he never made me feel, not once, like a burden or an explanation or a thing that required apology.
