Page 30 of The Intimacy of Finding You

“What’s got you so worked up, son?”

Shaking my head, I grabbed the throw pillow beside me, putting it in front of my stomach like it was a shield of some sort. “Nothing in particular. Hey, do you need help cleaning out the rest of the garden before the snow comes through? I noticed some dead plants from our last round.”

He grabbed his mug, his hand shaking as he wrapped it around the handle. “No, they’ll wither and decompose themselves. Some of the flowers there will replant by themselves, too. They come back every year.”

“Oh, which ones?”

His head jerked back as he tried to take a sip and missed, some of the coffee dribbling down his chin. “Damn it.” He huffed, setting the mug back down. “Clumsy old man hands.”

When he started to try to get up, I stood instead, beating him to it. “I got it, Pops.”

I rushed to the kitchen for some paper towels, worried for a second about how hot the coffee must’ve been. What if he’d burned himself? When I brought them back over, he snatched them out of my hands and started to wipe across his shirt and mouth, leaving a stain behind.

Holding my hand out for his trash, I nodded down at his shirt. “You’re supposed to dab it, I think. It won’t stain that way.”

“I don’t care about a few stains anymore, Cally. I care about my hands working like they’re supposed to.”

“Oh, Papa. Have they gotten worse? Do you think you need to make an appointment with the doctor?” He’d been shaking a lot more recently, which is something that’d started when we found out he was having heart trouble.

“The doctor can’t cure old age.”

“But if it’s something to do with your heart, we’d want to know, right?”

“It has nothing to do with my heart. Shaking isn’t one of the symptoms. You know what it’s a symptom of?”

He was waiting for an answer from me instead of just telling me. It was something he’d done when I was a kid, and he’d been trying to teach me critical thinking skills—I was supposed to think about what he’d asked and come to my own conclusion. He never answered for me, even if it was rhetorical. It was annoying sometimes. “Well, I just don’t see how that can be from old age. Like, doesn’t something specifically have to cause it?”

Sighing, he picked his coffee mug back up, holding it with both hands this time. “It can happen, yes. As we age, our bodies just stop working the same. It’s a real pain in the ass, in my opinion. Tremors and weakness often come with getting older.”

“Just tell me if it gets worse, will you? I’ll make you an appointment myself if I have to.”

When he finally took a sip, he sighed and smacked his lips before setting the cup back down. “Some damn good coffee, if I do say so myself. I’ll let you know if anything changes, but I’m fine, son. Don’t worry. I just wish my body still worked like it did when I was younger.”

God, it ate me up inside to hear him talk like that. “I wish I could get down on my knees and reliably get back up, and I’m only thirty-three, Papa. We change. We’re supposed to change. If we stayed exactly as we were, life would be pretty damn boring.”

I’d changed a lot in the last decade specifically. Much like Tobi had. Papa had done the same—getting frailer with each passing day, needing a cane to get around much anymore, having to be extra careful out in the sun. The list went on for him, and it almost killed me. I couldn’t ever begin to think about how he felt about it.

“You know, I built your grandmother a big wooden vanity for one of our anniversaries when we were young. Way before we had your mom to care for. She loved it so much. She did her hair sitting in front of that vanity every single day. I’d make her gifts all the time instead of going out and spending most of my hard-earned money.” He smiled, leaning back in his recliner. “She always called me her handyman. I miss those days sometimes, but if I hadn’t moved forward in life, I never would’ve met my favorite grandson, so it was totally worth it.”

On the mantel in front of us, there were dozens of framed photographs. Most of them were of Papa and Grammy, their faces much younger and their eyes much brighter. Some of them had them and my mom together. Family portraits with smiles on their faces.

I often wondered if they knew Mom was going to have the troubles she did. Was she unruly as a kid? Or was it the calm before the storm? It had me wondering what caused the switch or if there was one at all.

“Pops, can you tell me how you and Grammy met again?”

That always had his face lighting up. When I asked about Grammy or their past together, he would perk up and get what almost looked like longing in his eyes. “Oh gosh. Well, we met at school. She hated me at first. Thought I was just some loser set out to bother her. I didn’t have very many friends, and I was quite the nerd. One day, she asked me for help with her math homework. I thought I was going to die on the spot when she’d asked me that. I was in shock that she’d even approached me. I said yes, of course, but I didn’t say it in that many words. I stumbled around, damn near falling face-first onto the floor from shock. Shock that the prettiest girl I’d ever seen was in my vicinity, asking me a question.

“We started meeting up in the library after school twice a week. I can’t remember what we were working on at the time, but I knew she needed extra help understanding it. We had to think outside the box. One day, instead of going over the homework, we just talked. We talked about all sorts of stuff. And from then on, we’d spend each tutoring session together like we were old friends just spending time together. I think I fell in love with her by our third worksheet.”

Hearing it, although it was probably the hundredth time, never got old. I loved hearing the light in his voice and seeing the usually tight muscles in his forehead relax. It was like when he talked about her, the entire weight of the world fled from his shoulders. He could breathe easier.

He’d lost the most important person in his life.

“Cally?”

I turned to him, tilting my head. “Yeah?”

“Are you having boy trouble?”