Somewhere Safe Enough to Stay

It’s pushing midnight, and the house has finally gone quiet. Melody is asleep beside me after fighting it with everything she had in her for what felt like hours. She knows we’re going home tomorrow, and she isn’t ready for this week to end. Honestly… neither am I. She would have stayed up all night if Pawpaw had let her…  listening to him half-watch Walker, Texas Ranger while she separated canisters of coins into careful little piles like it was serious work. She kept telling him it was a treasure hunt. He’s been hunting treasure for as long as I can remember. She loves coming here. Truthfully, so do I. Time moves differently in this house. It always has. Slower. Like the outside world forgets to rush you once you cross the threshold. The world softens its grip the second you open that squeaky door, the Snoopy sticker in the window smiling back at you. 

The smell of Bruton snuff lives permanently in these walls. I washed these sheets when we got here, but every time Melody shifts beside me, the smell rises again, snuff and laundry detergent and something older underneath it all. It should bother me, but instead it feels grounding. Familiar. Safe. It feels like home in a way I’ll never know how to explain fully. Maybe because this is the only place that ever stayed the same long enough to feel like home. This is the only fixed home I’ve ever really had. With Mom, we moved constantly. Different houses, different towns, always temporary. Nowhere ever stayed long enough to become home except here. Pawpaw’s house never changed. Or maybe it did and I just didn’t notice until now. Everything feels mostly the same, just… smaller. The bed feels smaller. The rooms tighter. The ceilings lower. The hallway narrower. Childhood must stretch spaces wider than they really are, adulthood shrank it back down to size.

Today ended heavy. He woke us up the normal way, loud yodeling drifting down the hallway while bacon popped in the kitchen. Melody laughed so hard she nearly fell out of bed. Over breakfast, completely casual, he told me he wanted me to go into the back room and gather all of my dad’s trial books and court documents to take home with me. I’ve been asking to read those for years. Begging, honestly. Every time he told me no. Said I didn’t need to see all that yet. Today, without me asking, he just told me to get them. I don’t know if that means he finally thinks I’m ready… or if he’s simply tired of being the one carrying them.

After stacking the boxes near our bags, he decided we should start going through closets to make sure there wasn’t anything else of his stashed. Every one of them feels like opening a time capsule. Old clothes from decades ago, shoes that haven’t moved in years, stacks of cassette tapes that completely confused Melody. Watching her try to figure out what they were was almost as funny as realizing how ancient they must look to her. We laughed a lot today. But I have a complicated relationship with Pawpaw when he gets into these clearing-out moods. A quiet panic settles in my chest every time. Like he knows something I don’t. Like he’s preparing for an ending I refuse to imagine. I cannot picture my life without him. I don’t want to imagine helping Melody survive that loss either.

Moving everything stirred up years of dust, so I handed Melody a rag and put her to work wiping shelves. Pawpaw bragged on her nonstop, telling her how good she was at cleaning, how helpful she was, and her whole face lit up under his praise. Growing up, he rarely said “I love you.” I honestly can’t remember telling him I loved him and hearing it returned. His usual response was, “Ah, no you don’t.”

But with Melody, he answers every single time. Even when she yells it repeatedly just to hear it again and again. He never misses one.

Later, while she was busy, he asked about her dad. Asked if he’d been coming to see her. I told him no. He didn’t respond right away, but I watched disappointment settle across his face like weight. We sat there quiet for a long time before he finally said, almost to himself, “Wonder what makes him act like that… why he don’t come see her.” I told him I didn’t know, but I knew he wasn’t really asking me. He watched Melody for a while, those tired blue eyes glossy, and said softly, “I don’t either, Cole Butt. She’s a good kid.”

And I suddenly remembered being little, when my dad first went to prison, terrified that meant I’d lose Pawpaw, my aunts, my cousins… all of this. I can still see Pawpaw standing there, locking eyes with Mom, telling her flatly that we’d still be coming every other weekend. It wasn’t a request. It was a promise wrapped in a threat.  Making it clear that he and my aunt would do whatever was necessary if she tried to keep us away. We never missed a weekend.

He’s always been a complicated man. Quiet most days. Angry some days. Softer now than I ever remember him being when Chris and I were kids. Chris and I tease him about it, tell him he’s losing his edge. He just shakes his head. Tonight, though, I could see his mind turning. Out of nowhere he said, “I always thought you’d write books or something.” I laughed and asked why. And then he started reciting a poem I wrote when I was nine years old. Word for word. A silly rhyming poem about summers here…  barefoot kids, bikes, lightning bugs, him working in the garden. Back when I thought poems only counted if they rhymed. I was so proud of it then. I had it taped to the side of the refrigerator forever. I also remember forcing him and Chris to listen to it over and over until he’d run me off. So hearing him recite it now, perfectly, completely caught me off guard. He can’t read or write. That means he memorized it. I started crying before I could stop myself. He immediately told me to go to the room if I was going to “do all that.” I told him I wouldn’t, that it mattered to me that he remembered my poems over many years.

He made a disgusted face and muttered, “Pearl was always writing those damn poems, too”. I pointed toward the wall where one of hers still hangs framed. He waved a hand at it, quick to clarify that one of my aunts was the one who framed it, not him. I told him that might be true, but he’d had plenty of years to take it down if he didn’t like it. He laughed then, shaking his head. “You don’t quit, do you?”

I smiled and kept pushing, half-teasing, half needing to hear the truth out loud, and told him to just admit he loved hers. After a moment, he shrugged. “I guess I did… just never told her that.” Something in my chest tightened at that. So, half joking but quietly hopeful, I asked if this was his way of telling me he’d always loved mine too.

He shifted in his chair, suddenly serious. “Ah, hell,” he said. “I just wanted you to do more. Never wanted you to have a baby so young. Thought you’d write books or something. You’ve always been smart. I figured you would.”

And just like that, the joking disappeared. Suddenly, I’m sitting here holding contradictions I don’t know how to reconcile. He’s proud of my writing and disappointed I didn’t do more with it. He trained me to cook, clean, and run a home after Granny died and feels let down that building a home is what I ended up doing. He regretted me having Melody young and also worships the ground she walks on. I keep thinking maybe I’ll bring it up again in the morning. Ask him about it when the moment feels lighter, when it won’t sit so heavy between us. But I already know there’s no point. He’ll never admit again that he memorized my poems, or that he loved them. Moments like that don’t get repeated with him. Once they pass, they’re gone.

The window for that conversation has already closed. I doubt we’ll ever talk about it again. Still, I know he loves me. Even when he was hard on us, especially when he was hard on us, I never really doubted that part. Love just wasn’t something he said plainly. It shows up sideways. In expectations. In protection. In wanting more for me than the life he feared I settled into.

I think I’m going to try to let go of the disappointment sitting in my chest tonight. Because underneath all of it, what he really told me, in the only way he knows how, is that my writing mattered to him. That it stayed with him. That he saw something in me worth believing in long before I ever believed it myself. All those years I thought our words bounced off the walls and disappeared… they were actually being carried somewhere safe enough to stay.

I can’t wait to tell Chris about tonight, he’ll never believe me. 

Author’s Note:
Originally written: December 19, 2011 -

I wrote this entry in real time, long before I understood how sacred ordinary nights would become. At the time, it just felt like another visit to Pawpaw’s house, another heavy conversation I wasn’t sure how to hold, another moment I assumed I’d have the chance to revisit someday.

I did tell Chris about it. Just like I expected, he didn’t believe me at first. The idea that Pawpaw had memorized one of my poems felt impossible to both of us. Growing up, affection from him rarely sounded soft. Love came disguised as anger, correction, expectations, never praise spoken plainly. Chris told me it must have been hard hearing disappointment in Pawpaw’s voice that night, and he was right. It was. It was also the first and last time Pawpaw ever spoke something that vulnerable to me out loud.

Looking back now, I understand something I couldn’t fully see then.

My dad was gone, and Pawpaw stepped into a role he never officially claimed but never once abandoned. Every weekend, every summer, every quiet act of showing up… he raised us in the spaces where life had broken open. He was complicated, stubborn, sometimes impossibly hard… but he was also the one man I never doubted would have moved mountains if I needed him to. He acted irritated by my sensitivity, but he protected it anyway. I remember fishing trips where he’d tell Chris they’d come back later to catch fish to eat because “Cole Butt likes to come, too, and she needs to see them swim away.” Only now do I recognize that as tenderness.
For nearly two years, Melody and I stayed with him one week every month. She adored him completely. Even now, nine years after losing him, she still carries that grief in quiet ways. Watching him love her healed parts of me I didn’t realize were still waiting for permission to exist. The man who once ran me off for repeating poems sat endlessly watching her sing and dance, calling her “a sight,” sometimes joining in himself, then jokingly charging her a quarter for the performance. She’d argue he owed her two.

He softened with her in ways that rewrote pieces of my childhood memories and somehow, instead of hurting, it healed me.

What I didn’t know when I wrote this was how little time any of us actually had left. I didn’t know that one day I would reread these words after losing both Pawpaw and Chris, searching them for proof that love had always been there, even when it wasn’t spoken clearly.

And now I understand the part that mattered most. He never said he loved my writing. But he carried it. He remembered it. He kept it alive long after I stopped reading it out loud. Somewhere between disappointment and pride, between expectation and protection, he was telling me he saw who I was and who he believed I could become.

I think about that night differently now. I can’t remember ever sitting in his disappointment. I’m sitting in gratitude that I was loved by a man who maybe didn’t know how to say it gently… but said it anyway. 

And I’m grateful I told Chris.
I don’t think at the time that either of us knew then how few chances we’d have left to compare memories, to realize the people who loved us had been listening all along.

Oh, because I know y’all are itching to read the silly poem:
At Pawpaw’s house in the summer heat
Barefoot kids with dusty feet
He works in the yard and garden rows
While laughter follows wherever we go
We ride our bikes till the sun goes down
Chasing Charlotte all around
He smiled like he already knew
These are the days we’d miss someday, too
Lightning bugs blink when night begins
And we wish summer would never end
These simple days feel so big somehow
My favorite days even now.