I knew she married my grandfather, Frank Walker, when she was twenty-one. He was a carpenter. He built their house, their furniture, and most of the cabinets in half the kitchens in our town. He died in 2010 of a heart attack, while he was shoveling snow. Grandma found him in the driveway.
I knew they had one son. My father. Michael Walker.
My dad died when I was fifteen. A drunk driver ran a red light on a Friday night in November while he was driving home from work. He was thirty-eight years old.
After that, my mother kind of fell apart. She did her best, but she worked double shifts at the hospital in our town, and most nights she was too tired to do much more than sleep. So Grandma stepped in. She picked me up from school. She made me dinner. She sat at her kitchen table with me every night and made me do my homework, even when I told her I didn’t care about algebra and didn’t care about anything anymore.
