Staying True - A Contemporary Romance Novel (16 page)

Nadia cupped her clay ridden hand on
his wrist. “Ruby told me about your daughter and her accident on the stairs.
That must have been difficult.”

He licked his thin lips and shook off
a bad memory. “We all have our problems in life. We survive them.” He pulled
apart his clay. “Are you angry with her still?”

She pinched her clay. “That’s putting
it mildly.”

“You’ve got to find a way to get rid
of that. You’re far too young and sweet to carry that kind of bitterness around
with you for the rest of your life.”

“I agree,” Shawna said. “You have to
let it go.”

“You say that like it’s something I
can just toss aside and forget about.” Nadia stretched out her clay, pressing
it to the table with the palm of her hand.

“We’ll help you figure out a way,”
Shawna said. “That’s what friends are for.”

* *

Later that day, Nadia and I took my
grampa back to his apartment after we dropped off Shawna at the hotel. He fell
asleep watching a hockey game. I closely followed. I peeked over at Nadia and
she, too, had closed her eyes. I watched her sleep. Her silhouette breezed up
and down in gentle whispers. I could’ve watched her breathe, listened to her
gently snore, and fantasized about her curvy lips and velvety tongue forever.

She woke up and caught me staring at
her. She rolled over, all lazy and beautiful, and touched my lips with her
finger. “Your grampa told me something interesting today when you were talking
with the owner of the pottery café.”

“Did he tell you how much I nag him
for not taking his meds?”

She circled her finger around my
mouth and then down my jawline, to my throat and then dropped it to my arm. “He
told me how proud he was of you with how you handled your mother’s death.”

I gulped. Nadia circled her fingers
back to my throat. Their pressure mounted with each tough swallow. She stared
at me with such sweetness, such concern, such love that I welled up. My chin
quivered, and she started wiping my tears away with the back of her hand in
gentle, sweeping motions. No one had ever taken care of me in this way. No one
had ever asked me about my feelings.

“The day she died, I was supposed to
fill the washing machine with the clothes. Tuesdays were my day to clean the
house, do laundry and cook supper. Catherine, my best friend at the time,
invited me to her Girl Scouts meeting. I had been begging her forever to let me
go. Finally, her mother approved when I volunteered to watch their cat while
they vacationed the following month. I was supposed to be home, but instead I
sat in a circle with a bunch of girl scouts listening to some boring woman talk
about life. Had this happened any other Tuesday, I could’ve helped my mother.
She wouldn’t have died.”

Nadia pulled me into her arms and
rocked me.

“Just goes to show you,” I said. “You
can’t be everything to everyone.”

She didn’t respond with words.
Instead, she cradled me until I fell asleep.

* *

We woke at six o’clock that night.

“I’m starved,” Nadia said. “How about
I go to the store and get us something to cook for dinner?”

“I could go for meatloaf,” Grampa
said.

“Meatloaf it is, then.” Nadia climbed
to her feet and stretched, exposing her taut belly. “I’ll see what I can do
about finding us a dessert, too.”

When Nadia left, I looked at my
grampa’s messy hair. “You need a haircut.”

“No better time than the present.” He
climbed to his feet and walked to the bathroom. “I’ll grab the haircutting bag
and meet you in the kitchen.”

A minute later, he sat on a chair,
and I began cutting.

“She’s got big problems. She’s going
to need some help getting over that.”

I combed his hair and chopped into
it. “I have my doubts that this woman is even good for her.”

“Well, love will prompt you to do
funny things.”

I shook my head, stuck between lying
and surviving his statement. “Love is a funny word.”

“Complicated word,” he corrected.

“Yeah. People sacrifice themselves
over it.”

He pinched a smile on his face. “When
you love someone, it’s not a sacrifice.”

I walked around to his back and
chopped away at his long hair. Gray strands fell to his shoulders, taking up
company on them while I tried to even out the mess in the back of his head.

“Do you think she’ll stay married?”

I shrugged. “She’ll stick it out. She
has hope that things will go back to the way they were before. She’s not like
me. I would’ve walked away the minute I got the phone call about the accident.”

“I doubt that.” He bowed his head.

I chopped through his wiry hair,
attacking it. “I’m not my mother.”

“Where’s this anger coming from?” he
asked.

I chopped more of his hair. He loved
his daughter, and I bit my tongue every time he spoke about her as though she
reigned the world with angel wings to mother me. “I’m not angry. I just don’t
want to spend my life in a loveless marriage, that’s all.”

“Well, dear,” he started, turning
just as I chopped. I nicked my finger. Blood squirted. I screamed. He screamed.
I ran to kitchen sink and stuck it under the faucet. “Son of a bitch,” I
yelled. The sting buckled my knees.

Grampa climbed to his feet and
wobbled over to me, dragging his hair all over the kitchen floor. “You have to
squeeze it.” He tore off a paper towel and wrapped it around my finger.
“Squeeze like this.” My finger throbbed under the pressure.

I turned away from the bloody mess.
“I can’t look.”

He wrapped my finger tightly and
walked with me over to his kitchen table. I sat, and he dragged a chair to my
side and sat down. He held my finger up in the air and squeezed it. I looked at
the picture of Mother Mary on the wall next to the cloth wall calendar from
nineteen eighty-two. A picture of The Rafters sat just below the year.

“I miss that place,” I said, trying
to wrap my mind around something, anything but my ravaged finger.

“Ah, that place glowed with magic. It
had a healing quality to it. Guests would say it all the time. They’d come in
there with their broken lives, broken marriages, and broken hearts and leave
healed, strong and ready to forgive.”

Yet, it couldn’t heal him. The fact
that he just up and packed away his life because of someone else never sat
right with me. That’s what commitments did to a person. They robbed people of
the pleasure of pursuing their dreams. Nothing good ever came out of a
relationship.

The room silenced as we both stared
at this picture. We never spoke about that day we drove away. We never spoke
about how life just turned gray afterwards. He never brought it up, and neither
did I. I looked over at him. He looked sad. “I wish you would’ve stayed there.”

“I wanted to move on,” he said. He
squeezed my finger, applying more pressure than it needed.

“One of these days we should take a
trip there.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

He peeled away the paper towel and
examined my injury.

“You said it, though. It’s a place of
healing.”

His mouth hung open, and he looked
perplexed. I got woozy and turned back to the calendar.

“No one needs any healing here.”

“We could go fishing in our old
pond.”

“We’ve got plenty of ponds right here
in Rhode Island.”

I looked him squarely in the eye,
into the eye of a man who walked away from his dreams. “What are you afraid
of?”

He examined my finger. “Me afraid?”
He scoffed. “The past should just stay in the past.”

I pulled my finger away. “All of us
could use a good dose of that place.”

“All of us?” he asked.

“Me, you, Shawna, and Nadia. We could
all use a change of scenery.”

“I need to bandage this finger.” He
rose from his chair with a grunt and left me without an answer.

He bandaged my finger in silence. He
never quieted for this long. I had put a thought in his head, and I prayed he’d
come through on it. I wanted him to face his past so he could mend his broken
spirit once and for all. Fear didn’t sit right on his heart. It stole away the
very essence of his dynamic character. He needed to mend this. Shawna needed to
mend her frightful heart. Nadia needed to mend her restless feelings towards
Jessica.

“I’d be so happy if you agree to take
this trip.”

He eyed me, kissed my bandaged
finger, and walked back to the kitchen.

When Nadia returned, Grampa charged
into the living room. “Nadia, would you be interested in taking a trip with
us?”

I beamed and shot to my feet. “And
Shawna, too.”

“And Shawna, too,” he corrected.

“Where to?” Nadia asked.

“To The Rafters, to the place where
Ruby grew up.”

Her face blossomed into a smile.
“When do we leave?”

He looked to me, waiting on a
response. I imagined driving down the interstate en route to my old home,
Grampa smiling away, his teeth shining, and Shawna, Nadia, and I singing Billy
Joel at the top of our lungs while we crunched on Doritos.

“Let’s cook that meatloaf dinner and
leave first thing in the morning. I’ll call and make reservations,” I said.

“Hell, yeah,” Nadia said.

Grampa hugged her. “God I love a girl
who can shout out a good curse word without blinking.”

She kissed his cheek.

“I’ll call Shawna.” I pulled out my
cell phone. “This is just what she needs.”

* *

The next morning, I arrived at my
grampa’s apartment to find Shawna and Nadia already there scrambling eggs and
burning toast.

I sat down with Grampa on the couch
and stared at a picture of myself as a little girl. I was sitting on his lap.
We were crafting a kite together. We were laughing. His smile stretched far and
wide, and I looked like I was caught up in the moment, present, right there
living that precious moment of time when nothing else in the world mattered but
that kite.

“Do you remember when I got stung by
all of those bees the day we flew this kite?” I asked him.

He chuckled. “I felt so bad for you.
Your little legs could barely keep up with your fear that day. I thought for
sure you’d break something. I’ve never seen anyone sprint down a hill.”

Grampa remembered the finest of
details from the past.

“We had so much fun back then.” I
leaned against him admiring the memories that sat before us.

He cradled my wrist. “This trip is
going to be good for me.”

“It’ll be good for us all.”

I turned the photo album page and
landed on a picture of him and my grandma on their wedding day. She wore a simple,
cream dress with eyelets across the chest. Her hair swirled in finger waves and
her lips straightened into a line. “Was grandma a happy lady?”

“Oh yes.” He nodded. “Very happy,
indeed. Well, except for when I forgot to wipe mud from my shoes. She’d lay
into me for doing that.”

“Do you think we would’ve gotten
along?”

“She was just like your mother.
Sweet, accommodating, always trying to please. You would’ve had a blast
together.”

I turned the page and landed on their
wedding dance. “You loved her, huh?”

“Of course.” He rubbed his finger on
the worn photo album page. “She was my world until she died.”

“Did you know right away?”

“Naturally.”

His sureness with this word threw me
off. “You weren’t afraid to love her? Afraid she might not love you back? Or
worse, love you and leave you later?”

“It’s worth it.”

I turned to another page and landed
on The Rafters. I was about eight years old and skipping down the field where
dandelions grew tall and abundantly. How many times had I tossed myself down
that hill for a giggling tumble?

Grampa turned the next page, and we
stared at a picture of me swinging over the creek with a rope that he had tied
for me. Without looking up, he asked softly, “You love Nadia, don’t you?”

“Shh.” I turned towards the kitchen,
and Nadia stood at the stove, humming and flipping eggs. “I’m never going to
fall in love. It’s not my style.”

We both continued to gaze at the
picture of free-spirited me. “I messed you up, didn’t I?” he asked.

I snapped away from the picture. “Why
would you say such a thing?”

“Look at you.” He tossed his hand out
in front of him, to the picture of me so happy. “You’re afraid to love anyone.”
He exhaled and leaned back, turning from the photo album now and looking down
at his frail hands. He wrestled his two fingers together, twitching his mouth
side to side.

“You didn’t do that to me, Grampa. My
mother did.”