Few here want more confessions, if this is the audience, then feed it. Walter Rhodes, who might have been my grandfather, ran grocery stores the easy way, he signed papers, my grandmother did the work, kids of his kids, one say me, my sister, my brother, took our turns working the places in guise of being loved by the warring ageds.
Grandpa played dominoes with his cronies on the porch, daily, daily Grandma kicked the table upended and swore she was goddamned fed up with the sonofbitch who used his cripple to avoid labor, hiked her skirt at the cowed laughers, stormed back into the gloom, spitting snuff juice into her tin can never out of hand.
We kids spied Grandma, watched her heading for the back field, heard her cursing men, one devil in particular who was not Grandpa we later understood.
We later understood our mother was a god's gift to Grandma given by a passing grocery salesman who told the young woman her beauty was being wasted in Millersview tending racks of canned goods, honoring and obeying a fool who knew not what treasure his secret wife contained.
Grandma's treasure was unlocked with these whisperings and thence our mother, then our aunt, thence another aunt, as the years passed with the salesman replenishing racks of foodstuffs and candies and tools for keeping house.
We kids spied Grandma trekking to the back field where she entered a brushy wigwam made of mesquite and tumbleweed and feathers and dung. We kids heard her instant change from cursing as she crawled into her homestead, from cursing labor's grocery prison to crooning lovestruck of the orderbook of replenishment, the listing of the many varieties of foods needed to build healthy bodies, the overflowing baskets of children's fancies, the labor-saving implements of warmhearth homemaking, she sang, she moaned, she yelled in muffled shouts, she rustled the quivering wigwam in the throes of yearning for:
Walter, Walter, oh Walter, thank you, thank you ever so much, please come back again.
We three kids read in the newspapers later this Walter was not our mother's father, Grandma shot Grandpa, Grandpa shot Grandma, or Walter shot Walter, their daughters told their kids three different stories, the stories multiplied as the families told them to explain away uncontrollable engorgements.