In my dorm room we had a small TV, and one night I was watching the news out of Detroit – my college was within the signal zone of the Detroit stations. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the unofficial motto of local TV news, and so they had a leading, bleeding story that night.

The decapitated body of a volunteer firefighter and retired businessman had been found in the still-smouldering embers of his burned-down house. There was speculation reported in the news story that he was a degenerate gambler, or had gotten mixed up with organized crime somehow. The news story was framed as a “Shocking Double-Life of Apparent Upstanding Citizen” piece, not just a plain-jane murder/corpse-desecration/arson item.

In about the second sentence of the voiceover, the reporter stated the name of the deceased: Frank Runningwater.

That couldn’t be Grandma C.’s Mr. Runningwater, I thought. But how many volunteer firefighters named Frank Runningwater, of the same general age as my grandmother, in the same suburb of the same city where she lived, could there be?

She had dated, if you can call it that, only one man after my Grandpa died. His name was Mr. Runningwater. He used to take her to the volunteer firemen’s dances at the fire hall. He was of Native American extraction, I gathered, because she mockingly called him Mr. Redfoot when telling us disparaging stories about him.

Of all her hobbies, Grandma C.’s most relished one seemed to be maligning people in a fun, ludic way with a mile-wide bitter undercurrent. Over the years I heard her express loathing for “men,” “women,” “farmers,” and really… well, really just anyone who wasn’t related to her by blood (and even they weren’t always exempt).

“Ask me about old men sometime!” she would exclaim in a high-pitched yodel of exasperation. Or, “Women!” huff-laughing through the side of her mouth. “Oh my God, I can’t stand women!”

It was all an act. She was a shy, hurt person who cloaked herself in a performative mantle for protection.

She also had guns and large dogs for protection. Once when I was a teen staying with her out at the faux-farm, we saw on the TV news that an axe murderer was on the loose in Oakland County. I told her I was scared! She reassured me with a string of staccato sentences. “Honey. Don’t worry. Here. Come here.” And she took me up and showed me the rifle she kept propped against the wall next to her bed. She explained that it was loaded with buckshot, so she wouldn’t even have to aim if an intruder appeared in the doorway. Just shoot.

I don’t know what dark secret in her early life might have caused her to need to develop the cantankerous act she carried on her whole life.

But as far as I know she had never murdered anyone or been involved in a murder or its cover-up. She was my grandma, and all her funny putdowns and constant histrionics were just half the story. She had a soft side. When my brother and I would roughhouse and hit each other in front of her, she would make crying sounds and beg us with increasing loudness to stop: “Boo-hoo-hoo. No, kids, don’t fight. It hurts me. Love each other. Hitting each other hurts your grandma. It hurts me! Waaa-aa.”

So when I heard this news story, I weighed the possibility in my head, which made me feel a little guilty.

On one hand, based on things she said back then, I think she was embarrassed of Mr. Runningwater, afraid to have anyone think she might have liked him.

“I told him a million times to come around to the back door, the front door is winterproofed and sealed,” she complained once. “He showed up in the front anyway, and here he had”—she curled her fingers into her palm and stuck the fist out to demonstrate—“he had all this dirt under his fingernails! Dirt? I said right then and there, Oh my God! Get-out-of-my-LIFE!”

Some time after I caught that gruesome news story about a Mr. Runningwater, I remembered to ask Grandma about it. Casually but with titillation evident in my voice (I mean, come on, decapitation!) I said, “Hey, Grandma. That murder victim I saw on the news… Was that ‘your’ Mr. Runningwater?”

Her face dropped and hardened into the Swedish stone face I knew so well. Quickly, almost before I had even finished saying his name, she snapped, “I haven’t talked to him in years.” And with that I could tell that the subject was closed, for good or for bad.