He wasn’t the kind who shouted across the house or told embarrassing stories at dinner.
He was quiet.
Patient.
The kind of person who could sit in the backyard for forty minutes repairing a broken bird feeder while I talked about absolutely nothing.
He also had a refrigerator that seemed to contain an endless supply of chocolate.
Not normal chocolate, either.
The expensive kind.
The kind my mother never bought because she said it was “a ridiculous amount of money for something that disappears in three bites.”
Grandpa disagreed.
“That’s why we buy more,” he’d whisper to me.
Whenever I visited, he’d open the refrigerator and say,
“Let’s see if the chocolate fairy came last night.”
And somehow, miraculously, she always had.
But something had changed during the months before that Sunday.
Grandpa had become thinner.
He walked more slowly.
Sometimes he’d stop halfway across the room and put his hand against the wall.
