Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul by Jack Canfield

say, “Yes.”
    Dot looked troubled for long moments, then said, “No. That wouldn’t be right.”
    The no felt like a physical blow. Blood’s thicker’n water, came my grandma’s favorite litany. I’d not, until that very moment, grasped its meaning. My stepmother’s answer seemed proof that blood was thicker, that I was merely Daddy’s baggage—proof that, to her, despite the fact that she introduced me as “my daughter,” I was biologically not.
    I was of the water. So I distanced myself.
    My sulky aloofness hid a deep, deep need for acceptance. Yet, no matter how churlish I became, Dot never hurt me with harsh words. Ours was, in those trying days, a quiet, bewildered quest for harmony.
    After all, we were stuck with each other. She had no more choice than I.
    I visited Mama’s grave every chance I got, to talk things over with her. I never carried flowers because fresh arrangements always nestled lovingly against the headstone, put there, no doubt, by Daddy.
    Then, in my fourteenth year, I came in from school one day and saw my newborn baby brother, Michael. I hovered over the bassinet, gently stroking the velvety skin as tiny fingers grasped mine and drew them to the little mouth. I dissolved into pure, maternal mush. Dot, still in her hospital housecoat, stood beside me.
    In that moment, our gazes locked in wonder. “Can I hold him?”
    She lifted him and placed him in my arms.
    In a heartbeat, that tiny bundle snapped us together.
    â€œLike your new coat?” Dot asked that Christmas as I pulled the beautiful pimento-red topper from the gift package and tried it over my new wool sweater and skirt.
    In short months, Dot had become my best friend.
    At Grandma’s house one Sunday, I overheard her tell my aunt Annie Mary, “I told James I didn’t think it was right to force the kids to call me Mama. Irene will always be Mama to them. That’s only right.”
    So that’s why she’d said no.
    Or was it? Blood’s thicker’n water. Was Grandma right? Was that always true in matters pertaining to familial loyalty? I shrugged uneasily, telling myself that it didn’t matter anyway.
    Over the years, Dot embraced my husband, Lee, as “son,” soothed me through three childbirths, and afterward spent weeks with me, caring and seeing to my family’s needs. While grandmothering my children, she birthed three of her own, giving me two brothers and a sister. How special our children felt, growing up together, sharing unforgettable holidays like siblings.
    In 1974, Lee and I lived two hundred miles away when a tragic accident claimed our eleven-year-old Angie. By nightfall, Dot was there, holding me. She was utterly heartbroken.
    I moved bleakly through the funeral’s aftermath, secretly wanting to die. Every Friday evening, I dully watched Dot’s little VW pull into my driveway. “Daddy can’t come. He has to work,” she’d say. After leaving work, she drove four hours nonstop to be with me each weekend, a long trek that continued for three months.
    During those visits, she walked with me to the cemetery, held my hand and wept with me. If I didn’t feel like talking, she was quiet. If I talked, she listened. She was so there that, when I despaired, she single-handedly shouldered my anguish.
    Soon, I waited at the door on Fridays. Slowly, life seeped into me again.
    Nearly twenty years later, Dad’s sudden auto accident death yanked the earth from beneath me and again I lapsed into shock, inconsolable. My first reaction was, I need to be with Dot, my family.
    Then, for the first time since adolescence, a cold, irrational fear blasted me with the force of TNT. Dad, my genetic link, gone. I’d grown so secure with the Daddy-and-Dot alliance through the years that I’d simply taken family solidarity for granted. Now with Dad’s abrupt departure, the chasm he left loomed murky and