28.

The years drifted by, as years do. A more accurate verb has never been applied. Like rafts upon an ocean, or astronauts cut loose from their space walks, the anni float at a languid pace, with no set direction, providing an arbitrary definition of “progress.” Always moving, yes, always arriving somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

And of course, by “years,” I mean our lives. Our selves. Us. You and me. We drift.

1982, ’83, ’84, ’85. A dazzling era. Arcade games, home video games, Olympic Games, Trivial Pursuit games, War Games . The Year of the Bible. Swatches. Sally Ride. A bull terrier in shades pitching beer. The first execution by lethal injection. Music Tele-vision. Moonboots. Styrofoam. Chinese yo-yos. Happy Meals. The Computer is The Man of the Year. Saved whales, bludgeoned seals.

What began as a volunteer stint became a paying gig. St. Monica’s named Grandma Pencil the official Classroom Assistant—a position created for her. Five days a week, five hours a day, she went into rooms as needed, lending support, zipping zippers, licking gold stars, pitching in, scolding, making herself useful. Never mind that she had no qualifications, no formal training in education . . . Neither did the nuns! So it worked.

Grandma Pencil was, after all, just under fifty years old. A spring chicken by today’s standards, and what’s a chicken if it’s got nothing to peck?

Like her daughter, she’d never held a job. After the G.I.s freed her and her family from Los Baños on February 23, 1945, the Pen-solotschy clan came back to the U.S., to Kalamazoo, and lived off the money the government paid out to war widows. Her father hadn’t been a soldier, but all internment camp survivors were given this status. The money was a pittance. Annabelle’s mother knew what she had to do.

She remarried a year later. As Pencil would describe it, “Mommy got herself a little leprechaun.” By this, she wasn’t only referring to her stepfather’s diminutive stature, bright orange shock of hair, and deep Irish roots. What Grandma Pencil also meant was that Sean Flannery McCain had a giant pot of gold. But instead of having to be tricked, this leprechaun shared his gold recklessly, drunkenly. He foisted it on people in the same way a shore leave sailor passes gas—sometimes without even realizing he’s doing it.

And like it or not, everyone gets a taste.

Annabelle and her sisters ascended eight rungs, give or take, on the socioeconomic ladder. For a while, they lived the good life in a 5,000 square-foot home on the shore of Lake Michigan, near St. Joseph. McCain was an entrepreneur, a self-made man, an importer and dealer of exotic “native artwork.” He traveled to New Guinea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Nepal, Morocco, Madrid, Peru, and Bolivia, snatching up local treasures for pennies and selling them in the States at one thousand times the price he’d paid. He bought an even bigger house, this one in East Grand Rapids.

Annabelle was given a respectable private school education at St. Alphonsus and then West Catholic high school. After graduating summa cum laude, she shipped off to Aquinas College (a twenty-minute drive from home; she lived in the dorms all four years). She immersed herself in philosophical and religious texts and ate copious amounts of peanuts, crackers, Cheetos, and trail mix. The instant her stomach growled, all of the horror came rushing back: that furnace of a hut; that stifling air; those mosquitoes growing fat on her blood; the dysentery; the bones coming to life on her skin like a secret, buried self, threatening to burst forth and erase the girl she could see in the shard of mirrored glass her mother kept hidden beneath the straw mattress.

After college, Annabelle followed in her mother’s footsteps by marrying a nice Irish Catholic gentleman named Raynor Childs. Ray, in fact, was the Junior Regional Distribution Manager—or some such nonsense—for Sean McCain’s burgeoning Exotica and Tribal Wonders Emporium. Annabelle bore Ray a daughter, whom they named Misty. Shortly thereafter, Annabelle’s plumbing went bad. She underwent an emergency hysterectomy. Once Misty entered grade school, Annabelle made it clear to her husband that she wanted to get a job (her major was in Philosophy, her minor in Sociology), but Ray was firm: no wife of his would work. He insisted that she “take care of the house.”

What a smothering life that must have been for young Misty Childs! To have her mother at home every second of every day, scrutinizing her every move!

Wait . . . that’s exactly how it was for Audrey, McKenna, and Toby. Never mind.

From the outside, it undoubtedly seemed that Annabelle should be happy with her upper middle class, split-level ranch home in suburban Grand Rapids. Not to mention her healthy (if introverted and passive) daughter and handsome husband with his well-groomed mustache, stable career, and no apparent flaws other than a penchant for hording dirty magazines under the bed.

Most people would hear this described and say, “Now that’s the life!”

In truth, though, too much free time, too many quiet, uninterrupted moments of sitting, staring, and thinking . . . well, that can be the worst sort of slow death. Worse than cancer, because nobody actually believes it’s a disease. They’ll scoff and tell you to get off your lazy ass and do something, “Get a hobby, for Christ’s sake!”

And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Annabelle Childs,aka Annabelle Pensolotschy, aka Grandma Pencil, went as mad as a Columbian dwarf during those years as a “kept” woman.

No one but Misty and Annabelle knows exactly what went on in that house, but McKenna and Toby overheard many conversations between Mom and Dad. They pieced together a number of incidents: how Annabelle had gone into a rage while Ray was overseas, had torn apart his magazines and wallpapered the living room with nude women; how Annabelle forced Misty to copy lines out of the telephone book if Misty didn’t finish what was on her plate (“One page per pea,” they heard Misty say to Murray, with a tired laugh); how Annabelle became convinced that Ray had died during a Thailand jungle expedition; how Annabelle pulled Misty, quite literally, out of school and dragged her to the airport with only the clothes on her back (and a passport, one must presume); how they landed in Bangkok and spent the next two months hopping broken-down buses and third-class trains, searching remote villages for Ray, who had returned three days after they’d left town, and in a panic filed a missing persons report and corralled hundreds of search volunteers.

A short time later, Annabelle was placed in a home. “Mental exhaustion,” they labeled it. Annabelle’s sisters, at this point, were both married to Filipino men and living, ironically, in Manila, fifty miles from the site of their internment camp. Annabelle’s mother had long-since passed away, and there was no one to look after Misty. Rather than cut back his workload or stay home himself, Ray hired a full-time nanny and tutor (“My business doesn’t stop because your mother decides to have a breakdown!”).

After six months, Annabelle returned home. Misty spent the next seven years under the watchful eye of her “recovering” mom. Only the imagination can supply the details of that dark time. Needless to say, Misty bolted as soon as her leash was removed. At eighteen, she got her own apartment in the Heritage Hill district downtown. Shortly thereafter, she invited her new boyfriend Murray, who worked at the caulking glue factory, to move in.

Raynor Childs divorced Annabelle in 1972, the same year Misty gave birth to their grandchildren, McKenna and Toby. An alimony payment was agreed upon and signed into action, and then all that remained of this man—Misty’s father, Annabelle’s husband, and McKenna, Toby, and Audrey’s Grandpa Childs—was a washed-out black-and-white photograph showing him with Misty (age five or so) perched on his shoulders. Both of them are staring down into the rising mist of Victoria Falls.

The day is partly cloudy or partly sunny, depending.