I'm going to post occasional passages from the book I'm working on ("Under One Roof"). It's not entirely on the subject of our road trip, but, as I'm determined to finish this thing, it's as important to me as the scenery. This is about Worth's grandfather:

Grandpa used to live in the basement. He moved in shortly after dad left home, saying that it was important to have a man in the house. “A real man,” he had said. Mom’s version of the story was different. She told me (many years later) that she invited grandpa to live with us because he had been in a crippling depression since grandma died of lung cancer the year before. I also gathered that he was only an average father to mom; he wasn’t abusive, physically or otherwise, but distant, mercurial and far too wounded to be a stable figure in her life. As a grandfather, however, he was eminently sufficient, a bit too curt and volatile, but a font of swear words, magic tricks, inappropriate war stories, and off-color jokes, everything that an adolescent boy craves in an old geezer. He was also a drunk, whose pervasive bourbon and nicotine aroma was only partially eclipsed by the Brill Cream in his hair and the Aqua Velva he splashed onto his face throughout the day. He always wore a suit jacket, tie and fedora, even when he didn’t leave his basement bedroom all day long and I don’t recall ever seeing him without a cigarette dangling off his lips. He often lit his next cigarette with the one in his mouth and this left him with a permanent droop in his lower lip so that when he talked, words dribbled out his mouth like water out of the dented rim of a bucket. This created the illusion that, whenever he was talking to me, he was confiding in a fellow conspirator, which made me feel older than my years.