“You can say it as much as you want,” I said.
She started crying again.
“Tell me about him,” she said. “Please. Tell me what he was like. Not the pictures. The real him. I’ve only ever had pictures.”
So I told her.
I knelt on the floor of Room 214 with my grandmother’s hand on my shoulder and my birth grandmother’s hand on my cheek, and I told her about my father.
I told her that he was an electrician. That he could fix anything. That he once rewired our whole house in a weekend because he didn’t trust the guy who did it before.
I told her that he loved the Cincinnati Reds more than almost anything. That he took me to Opening Day every single year, even when we couldn’t afford it, and we’d sit in the cheap seats and eat hot dogs and he’d yell at the umpires until his voice was gone.
