Bob
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Up until now I have used initials so as not to identify people, but since several people in this portion of my story are deceased and their names aren’t super-unique, I’m going to leave them. Also, I wrote this last year and I’ve learned some additional information from my step-father, but this writing is from my knowledge as of 2022. Trigger warning: abuse
When my grandfather, “Big Daddy”, died in May of 1981 my grandmother really struggled. She was in her mid-40s, saddled with a toddler (me) that wasn’t even hers. She didn’t have a job or income besides her late husband’s life insurance, which she had to make last. She didn’t have much help around the house or with me because her kids, including my mother, had moved out and were living their lives. None of them lived far away, but as she told it, she was on her own. I don’t think she ever forgave even the neighbors for not helping her more than they did after her first husband died suddenly.
I don’t know how she met her second husband, but I imagine it had something to do with that CB radio in our den, since Bob was a long-distance truck driver. However they met, they were married on December 26, 1982.
Bob had three children and was either still married or in the process of separating from his wife, Doris. I was young and only vaguely remember growing up and hearing stories about how resentful Doris was of my grandmother for stealing her husband away from her and their kids. I have a fuzzy memory of Doris coming to our house to confront my grandmother — something about a phone call warning Doris was on her way, a gun, and Doris trying to hem my grandmother’s car in the driveway. These may have been two separate events but I was young and don’t remember exactly, but there was animosity between Bob’s first wife and my grandmother. I definitely remember hearing about how long it took to pay the divorce lawyer.
But Bob’s two oldest children were adults — his oldest daughter was already married and on her own. His youngest, a son named Dale, was around 16 and moved in with my grandmother and step-grandfather.
Bob was a long-distance truck driver for Southeastern Freight Lines in the early 1980s. He was gone for days at a time, leaving my grandmother alone with me, and Dale, presumably, for the time that Dale lived with us. Bob smoked and drank heavily and his drinking wasn’t confined to his days off at home. He lost that trucking job because of drunk driving and had to find another job. Another trucking company, Cardinal, hired him and again, he was fired for drunk driving. The last company he drove for was Guignard Freight Lines, and I guess they were didn’t know or were willing to overlook Bob’s drinking problem.
If we’re being completely honest, Bob was an alcoholic. In addition to that, he had a lot of health problems. When he and my grandmother married, he had been in a motorcycle accident that left what can only be described as a hole in the front of his shin. He would pour peroxide in it often over the years, so I can only imagine it wasn’t healing and was probably chronically infected. In his room he had dark blue carpet, which was often covered in skin flakes from the constantly peeling hole in his leg. Every so often, as a kid, I would vacuum and in his room it was sort of satisfying to see the difference once I’d finished vacuuming his carpet. In the late 1980s, Bob was hospitalized with heart and lung issues. We spent a lot of afternoons and evenings visiting him in the hospital or waiting to see him after a surgery. Later on, he was hospitalized again for a skin graft surgery. The surgeon cut a rectangle of skin from his upper thigh to graft over the hole in his lower leg.
I suppose my grandmother could see by 1986 that Bob wasn’t going to be a reliable breadwinner for us, so she got a job working as a preschool teacher’s assistant. She got the job when I was in first grade and I don’t think I adjusted well, at first, to her working. By the time I was in fifth grade, Bob was no longer able to work at all due to his health issues. He had emphysema and was tethered to an oxygen machine. I don’t know the extent of his heart issues, but I remember him showing me where he kept a tiny brown vial of nitroglycerin in case he needed it.
Bob was a pretty good cook though. We ran tubing from the oxygen machine in his bedroom all the way to the kitchen, and on his good days, he would sit at his spot at the kitchen table, meticulously chopping vegetables for his spaghetti sauce. Once, we went to Red Lobster for a family gathering, and Bob came home and set out to replicate their cheddar garlic biscuits. He made apple pies, oatmeal cookies, sausage cheese balls and other recipes that he either conjured up himself or from his little collection of recipe books on top of the freezer. So when I needed to copy the candy recipes for that Halloween potluck, I went to Bob for access to his recipe books.
My step-grandfather was an interesting character, and by “interesting” I don’t mean necessarily always in a positive way. He had his good characteristics, like his pursuits related to cooking. He also had a superhuman capability of basically being a human map. If you were lost, you could call him, and he could tell you how to get anywhere no matter where you were. I remember one night I missed my exit on the interstate or there was construction and I called him and he was able to get me rerouted while on the phone. I suppose it was from all of his years working as a truck driver, but he never forgot. Unfortunately, my step-grandfather was just a little creepy and a habitual liar.
When we would go out to eat, my Bob was handsy with the servers and grabbed their butts. He never touched me, at least not that I remember, but I always felt uneasy around him. I felt like he was always watching me and one time we caught each other. I was in my bedroom, fooling around with my boyfriend at the time, which admittedly I shouldn’t have been doing, when I looked up and saw Bob watching us at my door. I don’t know how long he had been standing there but it was definitely awkward.
When Bob’s kids would call, he would take the call in the kitchen and mumble into the phone so we couldn’t make out what he was saying. He also had a habit of hiding food in his room, my grandmother said he did that because of how things were at his first wife’s house. Ironically, when I was a teenager, I had to hide food in my room behind my bed so that my step-grandfather wouldn’t eat it all. My grandmother specifically told me to hide food and since I needed it for my school lunch, so I stashed everything between my bed and the wall. He ate a lot just because he was bored, I think, and if I kept food in the kitchen, it was up for grabs. Hiding my food didn’t work though, because when I left for school or my job, food went missing. Once, when I drove home from work or school, I looked through my bedroom’s open curtains and saw him scrounging around in my room. He had food in the kitchen, and probably stashed away in his dresser drawers, but he wanted mine, too.
My grandmother later discovered that in addition to food, he was also squirreling away alcohol and had a secret drinking habit, even though we all thought he quit years before. My grandmother, after I moved out, mentioned to me that she had noticed him stumbling and staggering around the house. I don’t think he ever stopped drinking and I can just imagine his sneaking off during the day to drink from his stash of booze, wherever he was hiding it.
We also thought he had quit smoking after all of his hospitalizations in the 1980s, but my grandmother also found out he was still smoking. He went to the store and bought egg nog powder, a thing I absolutely loved. He also bought cigarettes and forgot to remove the receipt from the bag, so that’s how my grandmother discovered that he was still smoking. I’m not sure if he ever really quit or just learned how not to get caught.
I have a lot of memories of the fights my grandmother had with Bob and it was generally the same things over and over because nothing ever changed. My grandmother saw her second husband as lazy, and compared to her first husband, he definitely was lazy. I couldn’t tell you a single time Bob mowed the yard or pruned a bush. And he definitely didn’t help with any cleaning inside the house. I usually cleaned his bathroom and my grandmother always prioritized cleaning his bedding and laundry. Only occasionally did Bob do anything related to their cars and there were some time periods where he cooked for us.
He enjoyed watching TV for hours on end, well into the wee hours of the morning, at an inconsiderate volume. Now that I think of it, between the two of them and their schedules, I don’t think the tv ever got a break. My grandmother and I had to get up early for school and work and my room was just across the hall from the den. My grandmother would yell at him for watching NASCAR or detective shows during the day or what she called “shoot ’em up bang bang” Westerns. And as annoyed as she was about him watching NASCAR on tv, she hated it that much more when he’d listen to it blaring on the radio.
Even though we ran his oxygen line to the kitchen, he often forgot or “forgot” to wear it when he returned from a trip to the bathroom. I think because he had smoked for so long, he had fluid in his lungs, which led to him coughing up phlegm. In addition to phlegm, he had developed an addiction to chewing tobacco, so he had “spit cups” stashed around the house. These were metal cans, usually soup cans, with wads of paper towels stuffed in the bottom. My grandmother hated finding them hidden around the house and it was enough to set her off. I guess it was pretty gross, finding cups of phlegm and tobacco spit randomly hidden around the house. Every birthday and holiday my grandmother’s kids would buy him Red Man chewing tobacco. I took the stance early on that I was not going to encourage that habit because of the ensuing arguments related to it and because the way I saw it, he’d replaced one bad habit with another.
Even Bob’s bathroom habits were a reason for a fight. He would often need to go to the bathroom coinciding with a chore. Whenever we pulled into my great-grandmother’s driveway, our car full of her groceries, he would make a beeline inside the house to avoid having to help unload the car or put away her groceries. Or, he would hide in the bathroom when he knew my grandmother was about to start one of her tirades against him. He could stay in here for ages, reading his collection of newspaper obituaries, which was another thing on my grandmother’s long list of pet peeves. Alternatively, if he had a bathroom accident because he hadn’t made it to the bathroom in time, she would yell at him for his laziness.
Another issue of contention was comparing her family to his family. Her kids bought her a new car. Her kids all had stable income and had never been arrested. Alternatively, his kids struggled with money and the law. His son was arrested for waving a gun in traffic in 1995. I remember because I had to help bail him out of jail with my birthday and Christmas money I’d saved up. When we would travel to visit my grandmother’s and Bob’s families, who lived relatively close to each other, we would spend most of the day with her relatives, which didn’t leave much time for my step-grandfather to see his extended family. On that one, I feel bad for Bob because the time split was definitely not equitable.
It’s slightly amusing that she used his kids’ run-ins with the law in their fights because my grandmother had a lead foot and had more than a couple of speeding tickets. She had a lawyer friend handle them but I remember while one of the officers was in his car, she told me how she’d considered lying to the officer about why she was driving so fast. I realize speeding tickets don’t compare to some of the things Bob’s kids did, but my grandmother was never able to see herself or her kids being anything less than perfect. Her youngest daughter abandoned a child and according to her, her son was a deadbeat, only paying the minimum child support, so I’m not really sure my grandmother had much of a case comparing her kids to Bob’s children. His waved a gun in traffic, hers abandoned their children. Potato, potahto.
Once my grandmother got going yelling at her husband, I knew it was only a matter of time before she turned her ire on me. My grandmother had serious stamina and a great memory because once she got started, she was able to remember everything you had ever done wrong in your life and she was like the Energizer Bunny because she could yell at you for hours on end. Her absolute favorite time to yell was when we were trapped in the car with her on the way to visit her mother. She could get in a good hour and a half of screaming and we were a captive audience stuck in that car with her.
Just my step-grandfather casually saying his “Cadillac” (he had always seen owning a Cadillac as “having made it”) instead of just calling it “his car”would set her off and she would spend the rest of the day going through her mental checklist of his faults. When I turned 18 and was preparing to move out, I wondered what they would fight about once I was no longer around for all the fights to be solely my fault. It didn’t take long after I was gone to find out that nothing changed with regards to the topics of their bickering. Eventually, many of their fights were about money because my grandmother was spending so much money (and time) hoarding food and feeding stray cats.
She had no qualms in telling me that she only married my step-grandfather because of needing someone to support us after her first husband died and she was stuck with me. Just another thing that was my fault because I was born and my parents both left and I got dumped on her. I remember after a particularly explosive argument, she and I got in her car because we were leaving (LEAVING leaving, not just going for a ride). Rather than actually leaving, we sat in her car, parked on the street for a good while. She told me how their fights were all my fault then we got out of the car and went back inside.
My step-grandfather was in no way an innocent victim in this relationship. He could be pretty manipulative as well, using me as a pawn. He was an expert on using my faults to distract from his own wrongdoings. I think he knew my grandmother’s buttons and about how long she would go before blowing her fuse. When he saw the signs or knew that he was pushing her limits, he knew how to deflect her anger onto me.
Once, when I was maybe five or six years old, he was home from a trucking haul and I had gotten a Garfield reflector for my bike from some cereal box. I hadn’t been able to attach it to my bike’s wheel spokes myself while he was gone, so I was bugging him to help me. It snapped around the spokes and my little hands either weren’t coordinated or strong enough to do it on my own. I guess I asked one too many times and he must have complained about my behavior to my grandmother. She had probably been building up steam for a while, being alone with me all week, their struggles with money, and his drinking and health problems because she let loose on me that afternoon. Since I had pestered her husband too many times about the Garfield bike reflector, she took me into the bathroom and beat me with a belt. I don’t know how long or how many times she hit me, but I either cried out that I needed to use the bathroom or maybe I peed on the floor. She finally stopped beating me with the belt and I never again asked my step-grandmother to do anything related to my bike.
But even after that beating, Bob always seemed to be willing and able to deflect my grandmother’s attention and anger toward me. If I was stepping out of line, in his opinion, he would threaten me by telling me I was “cruisin’ for a bruisin’”or “achin’ for a breakin’”. He never hit me, that I recall, but he would absolutely tattle on me to my grandmother. Once I was older, my grandmother stopped beating me, but the verbal and emotional abuse was just as damaging, if not worse.
If Bob was able to direct my grandmother’s rage at me, my grandmother would remain angry at just at me and he was off the hook. But there were occasions when this tactic didn’t work, like when he got caught buying cigarettes long after he said he had stopped smoking. Then my grandmother and step-grandfather would give each other the silent treatment for days.
Bob kept an “attitude adjuster” in his room. I think it was supposed to be a gag gift from one of his kids, but it was a wooden mallet with those words, “attitude adjuster” burned into it. I’m not sure which of us, myself or my grandmother, his children saw as in need of an attitude adjustment.
We also had guns in the house. There was a hunting rifle hung over the den doorway. My grandmother had a .38 in a cloth bag just hanging from the door in her closet and I think there were others in my step-grandfather’s room. Occasionally he would clean the guns at the kitchen table, and I know he gave one gun to my mother when she was living in our neighborhood.
One strange thing that just occurred to me recently was this: despite how we always struggled for money, especially once my grandmother’s teacher assistant job was our only source of income, Bob somehow managed to buy jewelry for my grandmother. He always bought her enormous, gaudy rings from Brownlee Jewelers that my grandmother never wore. Instead, she kept them in one of the dresser drawers in Bob’s room. I guess I should have noted before that they slept in separate bedrooms, supposedly because she couldn’t sleep with the noise of Bob’s oxygen machine.
Despite what felt like near-constant fighting, my grandmother and Bob stayed married. I often wondered why, especially after I had moved out, they kept living like that, at each other’s throats all the time. Often when I called their house, if my grandmother wasn’t home, my step-grandfather would use it as an opportunity to vent and tell me what was going on with my grandmother. She was out adding to her hoard and never home. She was out spending too much money on her hoard. I was glad to have been able to move out and vowed never to move back in with them. Eighteen years had been quite enough. I was happy enough with my life — my apartment, figuring out my college major, and working at the vet. I didn’t go home very often, but because I had signed up to take desserts to the vet’s Halloween party, I had a reason to go home.
