That weekend lasted seventeen years.
I have the bag. It is in the loft. He kept it, and he never said why, and I did not ask that either.
The rabbit is in a box in my room and I am twenty-two years old.
No birthday calls. No Christmas cards. No visits. No explanation.
Four telephone calls in seventeen years, all of them initiated by my grandfather, all of them under eleven minutes, and I was on the line for two of them.
I was eleven before I stopped asking him when they were coming.
I was eleven before I stopped asking him when they were coming, and he never once answered that question with a lie, which I only appreciated at about nineteen.
He raised me instead.
On a pension. Vegetables out of the garden, which I thought was a hobby and which I now understand was about eleven hundred dollars a year.
Secondhand furniture he did up himself in the shed, badly, and sold at a stall on Saturdays, which I also thought was a hobby.
And bedtime stories, every night until I was about nine, mostly about people who meant what they said.
He went to four parents’ evenings a year for eleven years.
He sat at the back, because he was the oldest person in that room by about twenty-five years and he knew it, and because he did not want anybody asking me about it the next day.
He wore a tie to every single one. I did not understand that until I was about nineteen either.
Yesterday I buried him. There were about sixty people at it and not one of them was related to me by blood.
Today the people who left me came back for everything he had.
PART 3
There were about twenty people in that house and in the drive by then.
Two neighbours who had come to help clear plates. My great-aunt. The two movers. A woman from the church with a dish.
My mother snapped her fingers in front of my face.
Then she pushed two black bin bags into my arms.
