My father was not good at everything. He was not good at talking. He was not good at school things. He came to exactly one parent-teacher conference in thirteen years and told me afterward in the car that the teacher seemed like she had a stick up her rear end and I should listen to her anyway. He missed my eighth-grade play, in which I had four lines as the Second Townsperson, because they would not let him swap the shift. He missed a lot of things because of shifts. He yelled sometimes, not often, but when he did it was loud and sudden like a car backfiring and then it was over, and he would come and find me afterward and stand in the door of my room and say, "All right," which was his apology, and I learned to take it as one. He could not cook anything except eggs, chili, and spaghetti with sauce from a jar to which he added a pound of browned ground beef and a whole raw onion chopped.
He was good at some things. He could braid my hair, French braids, tight and even, which he had learned from a library book with diagrams when I was four because I came home crying that Mrs. Petrenko pulled. He could fix anything with an engine. When my appendix burst at eleven he missed five days of work, the only ones in all those years, and slept in the chair beside my bed at Children's with his boots on. He never said a bad word about my mother. Not one. When I asked about her, which I did often when I was small and then less and then not at all, he would say that she had been sick, and that she had gone to try and get better, and that it was not my fault and it was not her fault exactly either. When I was fifteen I found her online, living in Tucson, sober nine years, remarried, working at a dog groomer. She wrote back to my message with a long apology full of the word journey, and we have exchanged maybe a dozen messages since. I do not know her. When I told my father I'd found her, he was quiet for a long time, standing at the sink with his hands in the dishwater, and then he said, "Good. That's good, Laney. I'm glad she's all right."
And he never said a bad word about Claudette.
That is the part I keep coming back to. I knew, growing up, that I had a grandmother on my mother's side, that she lived in Upper Arlington, that she was, as my father put it once, "fancy." I knew that she did not come around. I assumed this was because she was ashamed of my mother, or ashamed of us, of Weber Road and the chain-link fence and Pretzel the beagle. When her letter came, the spring I graduated from high school, in its heavy cream envelope with her return address embossed on the flap, I brought it to my father at the kitchen table and stood there while he read it, and I remember that his face did the thing it had done at the theater. Nothing happened in it at all.
"Well," he said, and handed it back to me. "She's your grandmother. That's yours to decide."
"Do you want me to?"
"I want you to do what you want."
"Dad."
"Laney." He looked up at me. "It's yours. I'm not going to tell you."
So I went. I took two buses to Upper Arlington on a Saturday in June in the dress I'd worn to prom, and Claudette opened the door of the pale brick house herself, and looked at me for a long moment on the doorstep, and then she said, in a voice that broke on the second word, "You have her chin." Then she took me inside and gave me iced tea in a glass so thin I was afraid to hold it.