Retreat to Love (18 page)

“Gran!”

“We were engaged. Are you and your Caleb engaged?”

Oops. “Well, you were still a teenager.”

“An engaged teenager. And don’t think I don’t know about you and Daryl.”

Double oops. “Fine. You and Pappa were having teenage sex.”

Her smile brightened enough to truly rearrange the lines on her face. “Not until after we were legally bound, dream girl, and don’t you forget it. We were only kissing on our picnic.”

“Shocking behavior. I’m telling my uncles.”

“They’re to defend me against their own father now are they?”

“Well your brothers have all passed, I can’t tell them.”

Gran blessed herself. So did I. Although I’ve never been a church-goer—Frank and Bernadette opposed organized religion like the good new-new-age hippies they were—I’d picked up the habit of making the sign of the cross over my own chest when Gran’s lost family members were mentioned. “Rest their souls,” she said. “And my Niall’s, too. He was a good man, Ashlyn.”

“The best.”

“I hope you find one as good yourself some day. I hope maybe you already have.”

The stinging behind my eyes wasn’t all due to missing Pappa. Just thinking about Caleb and the future sent bright pinwheels of hope and fear spinning within me. “Maybe,” I said, but quietly. It wasn’t time for those thoughts.

“And I got up the nerve to ask Niall about sex.”

I laughed. Gran’s timing couldn’t be beat. “What’d he say?”

“Poor Niall. He looked like he wanted to sink beneath, well, if not the earth, at least our picnic blanket. Do you remember how his ears went all pink?”

I shook my head. Tons of memories of Pappa, but not one to do with his ears.

“Well, they did, when he was embarrassed. And his ears went pink, and I thought it was to do with us both being virgins. No more of your faces, young lady. As it happens, I was the unsullied one, so you can just wait until you get to heaven and scold your Pappa then about it.”

I laughed. “Pretty sure he knew about Daryl, too.”

“He’s the one who caught you half-stripped behind the henhouse.”

Now there was a memory of Pappa I’d never lose. Come to think of it, his ears that afternoon had been rather bright.

“So no scolding in heaven. What he told me did break my heart that day. It truly did. But I was a teenager, and furious, and nervous about the rest of my life, and though I’ve never thought about it before—I’ve never talked about that day before now—I believe I was jealous. Not of her. Alice. Well, not because she’d lain with Niall. What made me burn was how I was inexperienced, a child, and she a woman. I was facing moving from my home where my ma directed us all to this unknown where I had to manage everything. It was daunting, and on top of all that, I had to learn about intimacy. And here was Niall already knowing everything, and keeping it from me.”

“What happened?”

“I accepted him, of course. How could I not?”

“But I mean, what happened with him and Alice?”

Gran huffed a short laugh. “Sex. Behind the henhouse, most likely.”

“Not behind the henhouse,” I said.

She squeezed my hand softly. “Well. Wherever it was. Alice was a neighbor, friendly with Niall’s sister Kitty. They took walks together, all three, and sometimes just Niall and Alice.  Kitty was sure they’d wed. And because neither of them had much else of a plan, they discussed it. And they were curious teens. So they went behind the henhouse and no one’s grandfather came along to stop them, and they ended up pregnant. He offered marriage. But he said it was Alice’s idea to go to England instead, and Kitty helped them arrange it all. The always helpful Kitty.”

Gran could be pretty sarcastic about a sister-in-law she’d never met.

“Once they were in Liverpool, Alice decided to see it through on her own. She said she never wanted to see him again, and I gather there were some words and some tears, but in the end he gave her what money he had and promised to stay in Liverpool while she went back to Dalkey. He only corresponded with her via Kitty, ensured Alice made it home all right. Once he’d earned some money he wrote to offer his hand again, and promised if she didn’t accept he would head to America on the next ship.”

All the pinwheel pieces in my heart had crashed apart. “What did she say?”

“Nothing. The reply came from that bitch Kitty, may she rest in peace.” We crossed ourselves. “More than seventy years, and I’ve never forgotten Niall’s face when he told me about it. He said it was the shortest letter he’d ever received. ‘May the wind be at your back always, Niall.’ Only that. She never answered the letters he sent from Texas, probably never passed his messages on to their parents.”

“How horrible. Poor Pappa.”

“Poor Niall. And hearing all that, how could I deny him the chance to form a family with me?”

“You couldn’t.”

“Well, no, I could not. And in my heart I didn’t want to. So,” she tilted her head, sighing, “we married.”

Poor Gran. Her teen bride self grappling with such a change in who she thought her fiancé truly was. Poor Pappa, carrying the guilt of the abortion and the loss of his family, burdens he knew he had to put down to move forward with Gran. They didn’t know about the years of war and the miscarriages and the drought ahead of them; it would have seemed a glittering future only accessible via a rickety bridge of hope and faith.

And just as they were about to start across, a plank fell into the abyss.

It sent my tears overflowing, contemplating what would have happened if they hadn’t trusted they could make the crossing together.

But cross the bridge together they did, only as it turned out, it a more rickety crossing than Gran had realized. And there I was sitting in her kitchen telling her the foundations of her life were unsteadier than she’d ever dreamed.

My gut curled further in on itself. “Oh, Gran. I don’t—I mean, you don’t think he ever knew? About the baby and the whole thing with his supposed death?”

She shook her head with the smallest of smiles. “I don’t, sweetheart. No, not my Niall, he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have stayed in England, or in Texas, knowing there was a child of his in Ireland. No. He never knew.” Gran swallowed back a gasp. “He never knew.”

I could feel my eyes jumping rapidly as they scanned her face. “I always thought he’d had a row with his family, or they’d died or something. He never mentioned much about them other than his childhood days, and I didn’t think to ask.”

“No, Niall was still devoted to them, as much as he could be. It broke him, I always thought, in so many little ways, being away. You don’t remember when he found out his mam had died? You were, oh, nine or ten?” Pappa used to take a day every few weeks to go to the downtown library and read the papers from home. From Ireland, that is. “It was mid-winter, but he spent the next two months ripping down and rebuilding your precious henhouse. Hardly spoke a word to any of us.” She sat back, exhaling fully this time.

Her movement seemed to break the closed system we’d made, beside each other at the table. I looked around. It was almost six. I hesitated. “I could tell them you’re ill, that we can’t make it.”

“Pah! Your mother would have Frank here within minutes. I do love the girl but here she is turning sixty and behaving still like a pre-teen.” We laughed, as usual for Gran and me, leaning our heads towards each other.

“Are you frightfully sad?”

“Oh, Sweetheart, I just can’t say. If it had been when Niall was still here, I think I’d have raged at him, but now …. A child there, too. A man, now. He’d be older than your uncle Dermot.” She stood. “Well, I’ll need time to digest all this, and stomaching it with a plate of enchiladas is as good as anything else. Don’t let me forget the gift, it’s on the hall bookcase.”

“I’ll put it with mine right now.” She patted my shoulder as she passed on the way to her bedroom, and I sighed. The telling of it was over, which was my hard part. Now the onus was on Gran, and she had stooped under it’s weight, though I watched her square her ever-more-sloping shoulders. Willing her pain to rest on me instead, my own heart sank a notch. I went to my shower.

It was a typical Frank and Bernadette evening—with the glorious addition of onlookers. I do know they love me. But she talks about me like I’m a kid being indulged in this silly little dream of quilting for a living, despite the fact I’ve managed to support myself through college and since, and Frank kicks in with his ‘oh but she has some real talent, our little girl.’ You’d think they’d never been hippies, hadn’t been stuck in the 70s for decades. Meanwhile we all heard at length about Zach’s wise career moves, his big success, his promising future. It amazed me they didn’t tweet screen shots of his tax return.

Usually, of course, I have Gran to back me up, or at least appreciate my attempts at self-deprecating comic relief. But she wasn’t taking in the celebration with her habitual three-sixty field of vision. I shuddered with the epiphany I hadn’t endured Frank and Bernadette without either Gran or Zach at my side for close to eight years.
Damn
, I thought,
am I afraid of my parents?
Well, probably not Frank. But maybe Bernadette.

Zach nudged me. “You look lost. Where’d you go, FireWind?”

I nudged back. “I wish. No. You wanna take a quick walk?”

“Think we’re allowed?”

“We’re adults, you know,” I said, not without irony.

“Easy for you to say, you’re bunking with Gran tonight.” But he followed me out to the verandah anyway. “S’up?”

“Shitloads. Night of revelations.” I sighed. “I’ll tell you the Gran thing on the way back tomorrow. But tell me something. Do you think I’m scared of Bernadette?”

He laughed.

“What?”

“Bernadette’s scared of you, is what.”

“You’re full of it.”

“I kid you not.”

“She said that?”

“No, of course not. And maybe, yeah, it’s less fear than ....” He was cut off by Frank bellowing out the door, “Kids! Candle time!”

“Goody, goody!” Zach jumped up. “Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

But I got him with the old swerve and curve move, so he was the rotten egg and had to give me the bigger plate, so there.

Bernadette’s friends had put together an aromatherapy massage spa day for her, which sent her into dream land, and not even Zach’s first edition of
The Power of Non-Violence
could top that. When she opened
Mama Bear
she said, “Oh, Ashlyn, what a lovely blanket!” and passed it over to Frank for his perusal.

Ah, well. At least the presents signaled the end of the party.

But then of course was the return home with a silent Gran. She wanted to sleep on it all, so we headed off to our rooms without further re-hashing of the Pappa story. I fell into dreamless sleep pretty much instantly, that’s how decidedly my brain wanted to avoid dealing with another thought by then.

All the FireWind breakfast duty had conditioned me to be up early. I made coffee and slipped back into Gran’s sewing room, locating her stash of scraps and sorting through them for border pieces for
Patchy Men
. I would assemble blues and deep greens as if they were actual patches on an old army blanket, the one I’d snagged it from Uncle Dermot a few years before, knowing someday it’d come in handy. I was always doing that; going to thrift stores and estate sales to collect other people’s junk I wanted to turn into art. My favorite form of recycling.

But again, I was avoiding.

So I made her favorite tea and looked in on Gran.

I guess people don’t tend to think their grandmothers are beautiful. Age and all. But something about Gran made it easy to stare at her face, though it was just as wrinkled and spotty as those of the rest of her generation. Her cheekbones still highlighted her eyes, and her lips, once almost over-full, had wrinkled down to a gentle cupid’s bow that was still rosier than her browning skin.

At a recent check-up her doctor had told her she had the spine of a fifty-year-old. But her posture was deceptive; I let her strong appearance and strong personality fool me into taking her resilience for granted. And after last night, seeing her so still and mechanical after our talk, I knew with finality Gran was not as rock solid as she seemed. I closed my eyes and sank the welling moisture of my tears and bent to kiss her forehead.

“Wake up sleepy-head. Zach’s gonna be here in two hours and I don’t want him to catch you lolling around in your night clothes.” Gran’s apple-green dressing gown was like her second skin; Zach called her Granny Smith whenever he saw it, which was pretty much whenever he saw her.

Gran yawned and smiled. “I need you to move back home, sweetheart, so you can bring me my tea in bed every morning.”

“Just give me a month,” I promised. Gran had practically thrown me out after college—she’d re-subscribed to the Houston paper just for the ‘For Rent’ listings.

We sat over breakfast, not talking. Still, it wasn’t like it was out of nowhere when Gran said, “Don’t tell Zach.” We both knew what was on our minds.

I swallowed. “You sure?”

“He’ll only talk to Bernadette. And then she’ll talk to Matthew and Dermot. And where would be the good in that?”

“But the kids, or grandkids, whatever they are? Are we?”

“Just going to leave them in Ireland? Yes, we are. What possible joy could it bring to their lives to know their grandfather deserted them before their da was even born? And they wouldn’t even have the chance to get to know Niall if they wanted to. He’s gone.”

“So, you’re...”

“Going to leave it be.” She held up her hand to quiet me. “No, sweetheart, I thought about it all night. It’s a miserable thing, a thing that does no one any good.” Then she squeezed my hand. “Except me.”

“How?”

“Because I know that, receiving this burden, you trust and love me enough to share it with me. Even guessing how it would hurt, you did what I would have wanted you to do.”

I was back to crying. Gran sighed. “There is one thing I thought I might do.”

I used the heel of my hand to squeegee my face. “What?”

“I thought if you could find the number for that wicked Kitty O’Connor, I’d ring her up and give her a piece of my mind for letting Niall’s baby grow up without knowing how deeply good his father was. And for letting Niall think his family had turned their backs on him, when really it was just her and her stupid stupid schemes.” Gran sighed again. “But I don’t think I want you to. I think just an evil minor part of my soul feels it would be justified, but the rest of me knows it will serve no purpose.”

Zach’s car turned in the drive. “I’m gonna find her number anyway, Gran. You’re too kind now, but if you wake up in the middle of the night sometime bent on vengeance, you’ll have it and know it’s morning time in Ireland.”

Finally her face softened into a smile. It wasn’t as rich as her usual, but it wasn’t hollow, either.

Then Zach came in and teased us about being a couple of sour apples and we teased him about rushing us so he could get back to his Rebecca faster and I loaded up my bags of treasure and the alcohol requisitioned by the others at FireWind, and we group hugged before hitting the road.

Zach was annoyed by my not telling him the Gran secret, but our in-depth analysis of when, based on the birthday bash, would be a good time to spring Rebecca on Bernadette and Frank distracted him from my sealed lips.

“And what the Freud were you talking about with this ‘Bernadette is scared of me’ crap, anyway?”

He snorted. “Like you didn’t know.”

“Oh, yeah, I knew. That’s why I’ve never mentioned it and am currently looking at you like you’re destined for the madhouse.”

“You did too.”

“Quit arguing with me, you big baby, and tell me what you’re talking about.”

“It’s only the same thing as always your whole life. Bernadette knows you love Gran better, she knows you prefer her company, and it scares the crap out of her she can’t relate to her own daughter in a meaningful way.”

“But I only spent so much time with Gran when we were little because Bernadette was too busy with work and with treating you like the king of the universe.”

“But she only treated me like the king of the universe because I responded to it, and whenever she tried it with you, you acted like she was, as you so eloquently say, destined for the madhouse,” he countered. “Plus there’s the jealousy.”

“Excuse me? The what?”

“You’ve heard the word before. You know, the little green-eyed boogie monsters all over the place because Bernadette’s mommy treats Bernadette’s baby like the child she’s always dreamed of, excuse the obvious pun. Bernadette just can’t measure up to the Dream Girl.”

I didn’t know how to begin to contradict him, but I threw in a “You’re so wrong,” just to let him know I wasn’t convinced.

“Seriously, Ash, you never thought about this? When like forever you and Gran have been bonding over the story of how you only stopped crying as a baby when Gran held you?”

Okay, we did keep that one active in the family lore. I sighed. “But I thought Bernadette just didn’t like me much.”

“Now I know you’re the crazy one. Ask Frank how many times she’s wondered when you two were finally going to become real friends.”

I shook my head. Bernadette had never displayed an iota of this frightened jealousy of me as far as I could remember. All the way past Columbus I moped over the idea Bernadette had secretly longed for me all these years. You’d think she could have found some way to let me know, other than the obviously doomed strategy of building alters to my paragon of a brother. Which Zach now claimed was a misguided attempt to show me how rewarding it would be to be Bernadette’s friend, so I would try harder to connect to her. As if. He was just attempting to hide his decades-old embarrassment at the preferential treatment he’d lapped up like an eager puppy for a good long while there, try as he might to deny it.

In this sulky manner we reached FireWind. Fortunately Caleb came over before we were done unloading the car, and Zach got to mutter, “Take her, but don’t say you weren’t warned about her loose grip on reality.” And Caleb looked confused and I laughed and then I was able to admit to Zach he might, in a very twisted and obscure way, have a point about me and Bernadette. Probably not, but there was a faint faint hint of logic in his argument I was willing to examine.

“You do that, sis,” he said and hightailed it back to Austin. Or, most likely, to Rebecca.

Caleb, showing an endearing level of perception, smothered me in a hug and ordered me inside for a back rub. Funny how walking back into the cabin with him felt like coming home.

“You look on the verge of collapse,” he fussed as I sank into the sofa.