Turk’s car is a red Mustang convertible with no backseat. I’ve never been in a convertible before, and I simply enjoy the straightaways and allow the chilly breeze to sweep through my hair. We don’t talk much as we drive through town. It’s like we’re on a roller coaster, with so much up and down that my stomach feels queasy even when we’re not taking a sharp turn at a high rate of speed.

We’re on a main thoroughfare, California Street, when he pulls abruptly into a parking spot. The street is on such a steep incline that I’m sure we’ll careen downhill, even after he sets the parking brake. He turns the wheel all the way so that it’s facing the curb.

Tall apartment buildings line both sides of the street. Maybe my grandfather lives in one of them? We walk a couple of blocks up the hill in silence. It’s a silence of anticipation.

I’m surprised when we cross the street in the direction of a hulking structure. It would not have been one of my first two thousand guesses of where he was taking me.

AS TURK LEADS me up the thirty or so steps to the entrance of this massive church, I figure it out. My grandfather is the music director here at Grace Cathedral.

Suddenly it all makes sense, all this stuff about religion we’ve been coming across. It all leads here. My grandfather, the man of God. It just fits. I’ve found him. I’m going to meet him. And I’m going to be able to reunite him with my dad. My heart pounds from the excitement.

Inside it’s ornate. There are crazy murals and stained-glass windows all over. Blue light streams in from slats in the incredibly high ceiling, and a few parishioners sit in the front pews. It’s a Monday morning, so no service is going on. People mill around, looking at an artistic display.

The display is a collection of rugs hung on the walls. Huge rugs, each with eight randomly colored panels that appear to be about six feet long and maybe half as tall, in two columns of four rows. Each panel is separate, but they’re stitched together to make a tapestry of sorts. They’re pretty to look at, but Turk grabs my hand and pulls me along so I can’t really examine them in detail. He’s walking with purpose, and I have to hurry to keep up.

We arrive at a rug at the end of the right aisle. He takes me to the left edge and points up.

“Second from the top,” he says, his voice husky.

I look up. The panel is black with white edges and a silver star in the upper right corner. In the lower left corner, someone has embroidered a brown grand piano with white musical notes emanating from it. In the lower right corner is a photo of a man whom I immediately recognize as my grandfather, because he looks like a weird version of my dad. Or me. His eyes are rolling left while his tongue sticks out to the right.

Underneath it reads, “If laughter is the best medicine, why am I dead?”

And in the center, embroidered in elegant script, it says,

Turk puts a hand on my shoulder and whispers, “Let it out, dear. Let it out.”

My grandfather is dead.

My grandfather, who was so much like me, who was supposed to have all the answers for me, whom I was sure I was about to meet. I’ll never get to look in his eyes. I’ll never get to make him laugh. He won’t come back to Billings with me, and reunite with my father.

Dead.

I howl. I just howl. I close my eyes and double over, and I scream the feelings onto the floor of the church until there’s no more air in me. My hands are on my knees like I’ve just been punched in the stomach. I stay down there for a while.

He died in some way that made it noteworthy enough to memorialize, and as soon as I think that thought, I know what he died of. I open my eyes, and I stand up. All the other panels in his tapestry have men’s names. The dates of birth are mostly the 1950s and 1960s. The dates of death are all in the 1980s and early 1990s.

My grandfather died of AIDS.

My grandfather was gay.

I close my eyes again and feel my brain spin. My grandfather, who must have felt he had to keep a secret all his life. Suddenly the pain in his journals makes perfect sense to me. He lived his life ashamed of who he was.

My grandmother, who must have felt so much agony when he told her. Who learned, more than twenty years into their relationship, that her husband wasn’t who she thought he was. Who was living in a lie and didn’t even know it.

My father, who has no clue why his dad left, and who must have felt his dad’s pain and shame all his life. And who passed that on to me in his own way.

And for what?

Then I cry for my father, who is also dying. One day soon he will cease to be alive and I will run out of time with him and we will never throw a ball around and we will never go to the movies or watch a football game, and my father, my poor, poor father, whose father left him. Who missed out on these same things and never knew why, who doesn’t know his father had AIDS, who all this time thought — I don’t even know what he thought, but it wasn’t good for him. Not knowing wasn’t good.

My focus widens from Grandpa’s panel to all the panels around his. Next to my grandfather is a panel for a man named Gordon Todd Jenkins, who was born on May 3, 1955. There’s a palm tree and the sun shining down on it. He must have loved the beach. He died on January 15, 1987. He was thirty-one.

Next to Gordon is Liam Holmes, who must have liked fishing and his country, based on the fishing pole and American flag. He was born on August 17, 1966. He died on December 25, 1989. Christmas Day of his twenty-third year.

All these people. I look farther and see panels for women too. Little babies. All their lights, snuffed out. All their families, like mine. Broken up too soon. It’s a tapestry of lives lost. It’s hundreds upon hundreds of souls expressed in fabric.

I cry for generations of pain. Not just for my family, but for all the families. I’m like a faucet, dry for years, and in the last week it’s been turned on slowly, and now it’s gushing. It’s ugly and snotty and loud and totally not embarrassing at all. I don’t care who sees me.

This is the most intense thing I’ve ever witnessed, and my legs start to shake. Turk seems to understand. He grasps my shoulder and holds me upright. I keep looking at panel after panel. Eugenia Lopez and her horn-rimmed glasses. Micah “Brandy” Washington and his hammer and wrench. Trina Goodman, age six, with tiny pajamas and a teddy bear. When I look down because I can’t see even one more memorial, he takes me by the shoulder and leads me toward the exit.

I turn back one last time to say good-bye to my grandfather.

TURK HANDS ME a wad of Kleenexes.

“How much do you know about AIDS?” he asks as we stand in the entrance hall. I look up at the sign above the door to the room we were in. The exhibit we’ve just seen is called “The NAMES Project.”

“Not much,” I say, embarrassed. AIDS has never felt real to me, pertinent to my life as a dorky heterosexual virgin. “I know it’s a disease, and I know people used to die of it and that now there’s medicine for it. That’s about all.”

“Do you want to hear a story?” Turk asks.