Page 49 of Worth the Fight

“Nope,” he says. “Mother nature made this one all by herself.”

I brush past him, moving to press the code to unlock the front door, and I swing it open. The rest of the house is still a work in progress. The old plaster that covered the walls has been ripped out, leaving the house down to the studs. Fresh electrical and insulation lines the walls, the drywall sitting in a pile in the garage waiting for me.

He’s mostly quiet as I show him around the house, nodding along at my comments as I tell him what I envision the rest of the house to look like. I show him the walls downstairs that I knocked out then started to reshape, and when we make our way back to the front entrance, I swear I can see his eyes start to blur.

“You all right, Pops?”

“I love this, Lukas.” He looks over at me, his hand coming up to squeeze my shoulder. “I’m proud of what you’ve done to this place. You brought it back to life. My parents would be proud to see what you’ve done with it.” He looks out over the tree line, where the setting sun casts an orange glow across the land. “They were sad to have to move out, but logistically, it didn’t make sense with all the kids and the farm being so far away.”

My throat becomes scratchy at that. My dad has said that he talked it over with Pops when I asked if I could have the house, but he didn’t go much further into their conversation. And while he seemed excited to talk about the renovations, I always wondered if it made him sad to see his childhood home change.

“Did you know that your grandma and I had broken up back in the day?”

My head whips to face him at the abrupt comment, and I stutter, not believing what I just heard.

He’s still staring over at the horizon, and when he turns back to meet my gaze, he smiles. “We were just kids. Eighteen, fresh out of high school when we met. She was shopping with her girlfriends at a dress store outside of Copper Ridge. I was across the street with my brothers, picking up some grain from the feed mill. I saw her across the street and thought, boy, she was the prettiest thing I had ever seen.”

I’ve heard bits and pieces of this story from my grandpa many times growing up. How he saw my grandma and knew right away that he wanted to marry her. He likes to brag that they dated for only a few months before he proposed, and they married on what would have been their six months dating anniversary.

“I fell in love with her from the start, kind of like with you and Magnolia,” he says, and my chest tightens.

“Some people search their whole lives to find someone but end up marrying out of convenience or compatibility, and that works for them. Then there are people like us who find someone we love at such a young age. And people often think that’s easier, but it isn’t.

“You may not believe it now that I’m an old man, but even though I loved your grandma and loved spending time with her, I still wanted to hang out with my buddies. I still wanted to go drink beer on an old dirt road and race tractors and do all kinds of stupid stuff. She wanted to settle down and get married and have babies. I was a nineteen-year-old punk kid, and I let my friends’ opinions wear on me.”

I shuffle backward, needing to sit on the front step to listen to his story.

“One day, I told her we were moving too fast, and that I needed time to think.” He turns to me. “Knowing your grandma, do you think she got upset?”

I can’t imagine my grandma ever yelling at someone. Never once in my life have I seen her raise her voice. She has a calm coolness to her tone, one that lets you know when she’s serious without yelling or using curse words.

“I told her that I wanted some freedom, that I wanted to hang out with my friends, that I was too young to settle down, and you know what she said to me?”

I shake my head back-and-forth, lost at this moment.

“Well, you know your grandma. She cried, yeah, but very calmly said that it was fine. It was my choice to do what I wanted, but I needed to know that she wasn’t going to wait around for me to have my fun first and then come back to her.”

“So, what did you do?”

He pulls a cotton handkerchief from his back pocket, using it to wipe his nose and the back of his head before neatly folding it again. “I did what any young, dumb boy would do. I ended it. And it was the worst six days of my life.”

I laugh at that. “You guys broke up for only six days? Is that really a breakup?”

His lips twitch with a smile. “Felt like it to me. On day five, I heard that she had a date with this other guy in town, and it made me sick to my stomach. Even when I was ending it, when she told me that she wasn’t going to wait around, I knew at that moment, I was making the wrong choice. But I was too stubborn, too bull-headed, too worried about what my friends would say to change my mind.”

I understand what he means. Even the times where I had Mags on the phone and I was being a dick, I knew I needed to stop. Knew that she didn’t deserve it. Knew that I would end up saying or doing something I regretted, but I ignored it all, even though it made me sick.

“On day five,” he continues, “when I heard she was going on a date. I parked my car on Main Street and watched her walk into the diner with another man.”

“Did you follow them in?” I can’t imagine my grandpa would be that type of man. One that would follow his date into a restaurant and cause a scene.

“Nope. Your grandma is the type of woman that needs more than just words. She needs action. She needed me to follow through if I really meant it. I had made her feel like my friends were more important, that I wanted to keep her a secret, like she didn’t matter to me. Instead, I stole some of my daddy’s paint, and I climbed the water tower and wrote out ‘Warren Loves LuAnne.’”

I burst out laughing, slapping a hand over my face at the thought of that. “No, you didn’t!”

He sticks his tongue in his cheek to try to fight the laughter. “I’m not proud of that, Lukas. It’s not something I’d ever want my kids or grandkids or great-grandkids to ever do, but it worked.”

“She saw it?”