So inanely I spoke, my lips felt parched. The frantic thought came to me that I had to escape—push out over the woman, stumble along the aisle to the rear of the bus, find an empty seat . . .

But the bus was moving, the driver would shout at me. The friendly woman would be surprised, and hurt.

“How old was your grandpa?”

“I—I don’t know . . .”

“Real old, or just—kind of old? Seventy-five? Eighty? Or—younger? Ohhh, I hope not.” Laughing, as if the prospect of a young grandpa dying was especially alarming. “Did you love him a lot?”

Love him a lot. How absurd was this!

“Y-Yes . . .”

“Oh, I loved my grandpa a lot, too! Just the one grandpa I knew, the other I didn’t know, I guess my momma didn’t, either. But the one—I did know, he was a blessed person.”

Blessed. The word was a blank to me, beyond comprehension.

Oblivious of my discomfort the woman persisted: “Is this grandpa your momma’s father, or your daddy’s? Were they close?”

Determined not to answer any more inane questions. I would take out a textbook and begin to read.

But heard myself say stammering that Grandpa was my father’s father. No, they were not close. But maybe—yes. They didn’t get along but they were close. I thought so. Maybe they were. Maybe it was a bad shock to my father, that Grandpa had died. “My father doesn’t like things to change. He feels sad, he can’t make things better than they are for his family.”

Why I was speaking in this way to a stranger on a Greyhound bus, I had no idea. Though I felt sulky, hostile, prickly as a wild creature trapped in a corner my voice was the voice of a child in need of consolation.

“Oh, your daddy will take it hard! They all do. It’s like a woman losing her mother—real hard. Like, if they ain’t been getting along, it’s worse, ’cause they can’t make it up, and that’s the worst—you can’t change how the other person feels, ’cause it’s too late. And what you feel—it’s too late.”

Like warm water the woman’s sympathy spilled onto me. A miserable sensation, yet I could not break away.

Heard myself say suddenly it had been a terrible shock to me, news of my grandfather’s death. “I guess—I will miss him a lot . . .”

Astonishing, the words that spilled from me. Maudlin tears in my eyes for a grandfather I might have loved if he’d loved me—if, in fact, Grandpa had been a different person. Grieving for a person who’d never existed—like reaching into your pocket and encountering a hole in the fabric. Whatever might’ve been in the pocket has vanished.