Bow-ling—that’s how my daughter says it. “Bow” like the reverent folding of the body at its waist. She’s barely taller than the pins, whose hulls of molded plastic shine in primary colors: yellow, red, blue. On the patio tiles, I arrange them for toppling, one by one.

My grandfather was a pin boy as a teenager, I recall, assembling the pins in a triangle. At a bowling alley he set the pins manually, probably with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

I didn’t cry when he died last year. The old man dropped dead just after midnight, the morning after Christmas. His staunch body must’ve buckled as he fell face-first onto the floor. Cardiac arrest. Again, I didn’t cry.

Afterward I visited his house with my Mom and my Aunt, the only one of us who looked at the body. (I prefer not to see the dead, despite the advice about closure. I guess I just prefer openings.)

Have you ever entered the home of a man who walked out the door thinking he’d return? And especially such a stickler? Who fashioned everything—and I mean everything—to his desires? Who left all of the items exactly as he did for the 25 years you knew him? Diet sodas in the fridge, Bakelite comb beside the bathroom sink, t-shirts starched (t-shirts starched!) and hanging in the closet, gun in his nightstand.

Hey, it’s Uncle Frank, my Aunt said, opening the cherry wood drawer. Huh?

The gun—he called it Uncle Frank.

I had no idea about the name.

As a kid, I helped him make his bullets in the garage. We sat at his work bench beneath a poster of a woman in an orange bikini.

You’re young, my mother would tell me. When you grow up to be a woman with your own opinions, he won’t like you anymore.

When I was seven he taught me how to mix him a Manhattan. I liked the kerplunk of the maraschino cherries, the syrup staining my fingers.

Mom, look, my daughter says, the ball in her arms, ready for throwing, all of the sweetness and good in the universe compressed into her small form like carbon into a diamond.

We would spend weekends at his house, my brother and me. He would take us aside before leaving for the night on his motorcycle. He told us he was riding off to visit the Dalai Lama in Tibet.

On your motorcycle? I asked.

Huh? (He had such a nasal way of saying it. He took his vowels and flung them in the air like a juggler.)

ON YOUR MOTORCYCLE? (He was hard of hearing, so you had to say everything twice.)

You betcha.

As he roared away, I’d watch through the vertical blinds, wondering about Tibet. It wasn’t until I was an adult that he learned he had it all wrong, and the Dalai Lama in fact lived in exile. He had almost everything wrong, my grandfather. And now I have my lifetime to consider his lifetime of errors. This is what we do to our children and our children’s children.

That day we visited his house, the blinds were closed, swinging back and forth in the air conditioning, blowing at a practical 79 degrees.

Memories dwell like rooms in the mind. When I trip one open, I have no choice but to walk through the door. Maybe I will be ransacked. Or rearranged. Maybe I will find everything untouched as a dead man’s home.

My daughter heaves the toy ball. It lands in the grass, far from the pins. Not quite a strike, but I clap for her anyway.

You’ll figure it out, I say. You’ll get there.

Megan Peck Shub is a producer at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her fiction debut is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, and her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Maudlin House and The Independent. twitter: @meganpeckshub