And after everything, at last, and for good, it was home.

I have kept that word too — home — and turned it over as I once turned over my grandmother’s other words, because she used it deliberately, and it meant more than a house.

My father had wanted the house; he had schemed and forged and abandoned his mother for the house, the thirty acres, the property value, the asset to be liquidated.

And in the end he did not get the house, and my grandmother kept it, and the deepest irony of the whole affair is that the thing he was actually chasing — the house as a possession, a number, a thing to be sold — was never the thing that made it worth having.