I was back at the house that night, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open and the notebook beside me. My siblings had gone back to their separate cities. The house was mine for however long it took Matthew to decide what to do with it, and in that interim I was occupying it as I had occupied it for the past several years, with the specific domesticity of someone for whom a place has become genuinely home rather than merely familiar.
I entered the first set of coordinates. A location appeared, downtown, a block I knew by sight but did not know well. I entered the second. Another location, across town. By the time I had entered all five, I had five points marked across the city, none of them overlapping, each in a distinct neighborhood. I sat back in my chair and looked at them for a long time.
What were you trying to tell me, I said aloud to the empty kitchen.
The empty kitchen did not answer, but I had not expected it to. Grandpa communicated through arrangement rather than declaration. The answer was in the coordinates, and the coordinates led to locations, and the locations were the next step. I was not going to sit at a kitchen table and think my way to the conclusion. I was going to have to go.
I slept poorly, moving in and out of dreams that had the texture of memory rather than invention, Grandpa at the kitchen table with his ledger, Grandpa at the park with his hands in his coat pockets watching me on the climbing frame, Grandpa at the door of my bedroom when I was twelve and had been crying about something Matthew had said, not offering a speech or a solution, just standing in the doorway with a cup of tea he set on my nightstand and then left without requiring anything of me in return.
The first location was a small auto repair shop on a side street I had driven past a hundred times without registering. I parked across the street and sat for a moment, which was a habit I had developed that morning on the drive over, sitting a moment before going in to collect myself and remind myself that whatever came next was something Grandpa had arranged deliberately and with full knowledge of what it would mean to me, which meant I could trust it even when I could not yet see its shape.
Inside, behind a counter covered with parts catalogs and a coffee maker that had been running long enough to produce something approaching tar, was a man in his sixties with gray hair and a solid build and the particular unhurried quality of someone who has been in the same place for a long time and has made his peace with it. He looked up when I came in.
I said I thought my grandfather might have known him. I said his name was Walter. The man’s expression changed in the way expressions change when recognition arrives not just as information but as something that has been anticipated. He looked at me carefully.
