Memoir

My first month

I had just asked you out of the blue about a week before school started again. I didn't want to live at my moms because of bad history and you were willing to take me in. I stayed in the other side of the house where I was right next to the kitchen. I never realized that you kept buying me so much food in that first week and I was so unused to having tons of food in the pantry.
Unfortunately it was all junk like double snickers, chips, ice cream, chili, hotdogs.
Nothing healthy, the healthiest thing we had was tap water from the fridge.
I ate so much I gained 20 pounds in the first month of living with you.
But the first week changed me.
I went from eating only one ramen packet a day to eating 3 meals at least.
I went from being bullied to being unknown but talked about even if for bad reasons.
A lot of people knew about ur old womanizing ways and thought I was the new catch for awhile until they started figuring out I was your granddaughter.
I laughed when you would introduce me and their eyes would get wide and excited that I wasn't prey. Especially the girls from the Su Casa restaurant he visited like 5x a week at least just to chat with the girls. He never stepped over his boundaries and he gave good tips to the hardworking girls. He introduced me to the gang, the gossip shop guys, who met at least 3x a day for bitch and fit at the 7/11 on the other side of town. They would talk about everything under the sun at 6am, 2pm, and 6pm. Topics most commonly included Muslims, oil and gas, and women.
Apparently my name started getting mentioned a lot. I found the whole thing hilarious because I never knew how much you liked your routine and I was disrupting it in every way possible.
Apparently you loved it.
I wish I moved back in when you offered me to.
The gossip shop guys (Les and Robert) started learning everything about me, about how I was messy, moody, angsty, and hermit type of teenager who only seemed to come out of her room to eat. I think they thought it was funny that he was trying to figure out how to deal with me.
I was extremely difficult in the best of times. He liked the country radio loud because he was old and hard of hearing and I was hard of hearing but sensitive. He liked to run around the house in only an adult diaper and I didn't like it when he did that. It felt overwhelming to be around you since you were loud and I didn't know if you could be serious.
But it always makes me smile when I think of how much you cared even when I felt like I couldn't. It was never in words or touch or anything like that either. It was how he was always there to take me to get something to eat, or how if he noticed my clothes were old he would take me to get new clothes and not hand me downs, and the way he could find something to say to make me laugh or giggle.
My personal favorite was how at the end of every phone call we would loudly say byyyyyeeeee bye to each other in the most country accent we could manage. Never failed to get everyone's attention on me or him when we did it.
Hell, my friends started to do it to me because they also thought it was funny. You were always one to make everything humorous despite the times against us.
I loved your humor.