The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part One.

The summer before my senior year, my mother hijacked my life. There I was, finally doing okay. I had friends, I had my first boyfriend, I was planning on spending most of the summer rehearsing for "Cinderella," the district's summer musical. Ever humble, I figured I was a shoe-in for the part. (No pun intended.)

Then my mother announced that my grandpa's home in Sacramento needed to be sold. She, and I, would be spending the summer preparing the house.

"All summer. To clean out and sell a house? How long could that possibly take?" I asked.

She did not dignify the question with a response. It was, in fact, a ridiculous question.

My grandfather, whom I referred to as "Grandpa Kamp," was born Alexander David Steinkamp, the son of German immigrant farmers. He'd worked his way up the banking system to become (wait for it) the Deputy State Treasure of California. A pretty big deal, no joke. He was an excellent investor and banker, a methodical, meticulous man who still managed to be warm, charming and downright debonair.

When he began to lose his memory, he was the last to notice. Or maybe, ever the successful and self-assured businessman, he was just the last to admit. Either way, his dementia-hazed exploits kept us all on our toes.

We'd encountered the largest exploit (pun intended) four years earlier. Her name was Beverly, a retired...retired...come to think of it, we never knew quite what she had retired from. She was a corpulent, dark haired, scarlet-lipsticked woman, at least 35 years his junior, who had first met us in his driveway with arms outstretched and a crackling announcement of, "Oh, the family! Welcome! I'm Beverly Peace, and I'll probably be the next Mrs. Steinkamp!" She wore a colbalt-blue pantsuit with long strips of fabric dangling down from the sleeves. As she wavered closer, my father, ever the understated observer, hummed an low-register rendition of "Poor Unfortunate Souls."

Beverly posed both practical and spiritual issues for my mother. Practically, she appeared galvanizingly close to cozening Grandpa, in his pathetic grasp at the straws of dignity and charm he'd once exuded, into a ruinous marriage. Spiritually, she was, well, difficult to love. My mother is not the type to admit her struggles to love the world. Ask her, and she will tell you that she loves everyone. She will believe herself whole-heartedly, which is, I believe, over half the battle. Still, the desire to love and witness love to all can complicate an otherwise simple situation.

That pesky love caused her to shake her head when her cousin spontaneously suggested a "ghastly chandelier accident" at Grandpa's 90th birthday. "It could drop," mused Jean, "quite naturally, just, you know, it's an old house," gesturing to Beverly, who, true to her name, was peacefully bestowing cake and punch as if the depression-glass ladle was already hers to wield.

Several years had passed since the dawn of Beverly Peace, and we'd managed, for the most part, to pry our sweet Grandfather out of her clutches. True to form, my mother loved her through the entire process. And sadly, it was not a strategic chandelier which severed her tentacles. It was the disease, coddling and curdling his mind deeper down into confusion. Dementia took him from his home in Sacramento, turned him from a charming storyteller to one who owned only one alarming loop of words, repeated every 10 minutes. He moved into the second home he'd wisely purchased next to ours. Round-the-clock caretakers moved in with him.

So it was clear, at this point, that he'd never return to Sacramento, and it was clear that he'd never be the one to sell his house. His impressive thrift, minted by the Great Depression, extended not only to his finances but into every corner of his world. As my question, "how long could that possibly take?" echoed against the silent wall of my mother, I pictured the packed closets, tables, garage and guesthouse of his Sacramento home. I knew we'd be lucky to finish such a task in one summer. I knew I'd be lucky if she didn't enroll me as a senior up in Sacramento. I watched my glass-slipper dreams crunch under the weight of 60 years' hoarded investment papers and table saws.

The summer began with a long car ride, on which I mentally composed a Guidepost Magazine essay about my martyrdom of a summer break. The theme revolved around Higher Ways: how miraculously, I had been placed in Sacramento for a reason no human being could have anticipated. (I saved a child from drowning in the Land Park pond...no, a whole schoolbus of children...no, I noticed a fire started by my grandfather's pot-head neighbors' carelessly lightin' up and I snuffed it out before it destroyed the entire Land Park and Downtown region...nay, the city. Maybe after the fire I met my husband--being 16, the though had no fear of actuality attached to it, simply romance.)

I spun out wild daydreams and watched the patterns in the crops as we wove up the grapevine.