My grandfather called me Birdie. No one else ever did, not before him and not after. He was a quiet man by nature, a carpenter by trade, and on Saturday mornings he would hand me a sanding block and let me work beside him without explaining why.
I was the only one he did that with. I understood later that this was his way of telling me something he didn’t have the words for, or maybe he had the words and just knew I wasn’t old enough yet to hear them. I was fifteen when he sat me on the porch of the house on Riddle Creek Road and said, “This house ain’t wood and nails, Birdie.
It’s a promise.”
I laughed. I was barefoot, drinking sweet tea from a mason jar, watching the heat shimmer over the gravel driveway. It seemed like a strange thing to say.
Two years later he was dead, and I was seventeen and standing in his empty workshop running my hand along the workbench he’d sanded smooth over decades. His coffee mug was still on the ledge, a ring of dried black at the bottom. The whole place smelled like sawdust and linseed oil.
I cried in that workshop for an hour. When I came back inside, my mother was on the phone. She hung up when she saw me.
I didn’t think anything of it. I was seventeen and my grandfather was gone and I had no idea that what she was taking from me had already started. One month after the funeral, she called me into the kitchen.
She was standing at the counter with her arms crossed and a mug of coffee she wasn’t drinking, and I could tell she’d been rehearsing. “Your grandfather didn’t leave a will,” she said. “There’s nothing.
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