My name is Perrin Everman, I am thirty-nine years old, and I want to tell you about the fellowship hall of Pearl Hollow Baptist, the same room where I ate green bean casserole off a paper plate at every homecoming of my childhood, on the afternoon my father threw a debit card at my feet in front of forty people and told me that was all I would ever get. He did it two hours after we buried my grandfather. He did it with a plate of funeral ham still in his other hand. He said, loud enough for half the room to hear it, “That’s the thousand dollars Daddy wanted you to have. That’s all you get. You were never really his, and after today you’re done asking me for anything.” Then he turned around and went back to the dessert table like he’d just settled a bar tab.
I want you to sit with that sentence the way I had to sit with it, standing there in my good black dress with a hard little plastic card by the toe of my shoe, because it is the whole story in one breath. My father used the word “his” like my grandfather was a fence he needed to draw a line inside of. He used the word “never” like it was a fact he’d been keeping in his pocket my whole life, waiting for the one day I couldn’t fight back in a room full of witnesses without making it about myself instead of about the man we’d just put in the ground.
I need to back up, though, because you should understand who my grandfather was to me before you understand what it cost me to lose him twice in one day, once in the ground and once at that dessert table.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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