Chapter 1
Chapter One
Six Grandkids and a Full Heart
There were six of us. Joslynn, Braelynn, Jeffery, Audrina, and me — six grandkids with six different laughs, six different personalities, and one grandmother who somehow made every single one of us feel like we were her favorite. That was her gift. That was just who she was.
She never made you feel like you were one of many. She made you feel like you were the one.
Her house had a feeling to it that I have never been able to find anywhere else. The moment you walked through the front door, something in you relaxed — like your shoulders had been up around your ears all week without you realizing it, and only now, here, could they finally come down. It smelled like warmth. It smelled like her.
All six of us knew that house like we knew our own names. We knew which drawer the good snacks were in, which chair was hers, and how the afternoon light fell across the living room floor in a way that made everything look golden. We knew it because she always made sure we were there. She wanted us close. She wanted us around the table, on the floor, underfoot — all of it. The louder the better, as far as she was concerned.
Some of my best memories in this world happened over a Connect Four board at her kitchen table.
She was competitive. I won't pretend otherwise. She did not let you win just because you were a grandkid — she played like she meant it, dropping her checkers with this satisfied little click whenever she got a good move in. But she also cheered just as loud when you beat her, and you always knew she meant that too. Winning felt real when you won against her because she made it real.
We played for hours sometimes. Game after game, the pieces clattering back into the box and then being set up all over again. And when we weren't playing Connect Four, we were doing crafts — spread out across her table with paper and scissors and glue and whatever she had collected for us, her hands moving alongside yours, patient and sure, making something out of nothing the way she always did.
She was good at that. Making something out of nothing. Making ordinary afternoons feel like the best day you'd had in a long time.
But the memory that finds me most often — the one that comes back on quiet nights when I'm not expecting it — is the bedtime story.
Whenever I stayed the night, she had a rule. I couldn't go to sleep until I had read her a story. Not the other way around. Me, reading to her. She would get settled in, all comfortable, and just wait for me to begin — like it was the part of the day she had been looking forward to most. Like my voice reading out loud to her was the thing that made the night feel complete.
I didn't understand it then the way I understand it now. Back then I just thought it was one of her funny little rules, the kind grandmas have. But now I know what she was doing. She was giving me something to be proud of. She was sitting still and listening like what I had to say mattered, like the words coming out of my mouth were worth paying attention to. She was telling me, without ever saying it outright, that I was enough. That I was more than enough.
She did that constantly. In a hundred different ways, through Connect Four and crafts and bedtime stories and the way she looked at you from across a crowded room full of grandkids — like you were the one she had been waiting to see.
Five grandkids. One grandmother. And somehow, an endless amount of love to go around.
I don't know how she did it. I only know that she did, and that the world has been a little quieter and a little smaller since she left it.
