My grandson comes and stays with me the whole summer, has ever since he was little. We fish the pond out back, tear around the place on my old John Deere, roast marshmallows over a fire in the evenings. Regular boy summer, the kind I had growing up here in Chillicothe. And every single year, come the end of August, he would get weepy about it, because he did not want to go back to school and leave the pond and the tractor and his grandpa. That was normal. That I understood. But this year was different. This year, the closer we got to the end of his visit, the quieter he went, and one evening I found him out on the porch in the dark, sitting by himself and crying, trying to hide it from me.
All summer that boy had been bright as a new penny. We caught bluegill off that pond near every morning, and he would whoop every time his bobber went under. He ate like a horse, slept like a rock, laughed at my dumb jokes. Then about a week before he was due to head home, it was like somebody turned his light off. He stopped eating much. He started wetting the bed at night, which he had not done since he was five years old. He would flinch when the phone rang, like he was afraid of who might be on it.
That evening on the porch I sat down next to him on the step, put my arm around his shoulders, and asked him gentle why he was fighting so hard against going home to his daddy. He rubbed at his eyes with his fist a long while. Then, not looking at me, he said, Grandpa, can I just stay here with you. Because Daddy scares me now, and his girlfriend scares me worse, and there is yelling all the time, and nobody watches me, and I do not feel safe in that house anymore.
My heart came apart right there on that porch step.
His mama, my daughter, is gone, passed three years back, and the boy went to his father because that is where a boy goes. But things had turned bad in that house, bad and unsafe, and a nine-year-old had been carrying it alone, dreading the end of every summer because summer was the only safe stretch of his year.
I did not send him back. I got a lawyer the next morning, and I got that boy in front of a doctor and a counselor who documented everything, the weight he lost, the bed-wetting, the fear, and who wrote it all down the way a judge needs to see it.
It was not quick and it was not easy, but the court saw what I saw. My grandson lives with me now, full time, in the house with the pond and the tractor and the marshmallow fires. His daddy has supervised visits and a list of things he has to fix in his own life, and whether he does them is on him. But that boy does not go back to being scared.
You mean I do not have to leave at the end of summer? I get to just stay? For real, Grandpa?
For real, I told him. This is your home now. It always was.
He does not wet the bed anymore. He does not flinch at the phone. He is bright as a new penny again, all year round now, not just June to August. We fish that pond every morning of his life, and neither one of us ever has to watch the calendar for the day he leaves. Because he is not leaving. Not ever again.