Staying True - A Contemporary Romance Novel (7 page)

Outside on the front walk, I kissed
his cheek. He smelled like Irish Spring. He glanced at my thin t-shirt and
hatless head. “You’re going to catch a sunburn walking around in this heat like
that.”

“Yes, sir, I know.” I reached up to
his hat and stole it from him and skipped to the car. “Next time, I’ll be more
careful,” I shouted over my shoulder.

We drove to church in comfortable
silence. He stared out of the window as if in awe of the lush green landscape
and wild flowers. His mouth hinged open, his eyes stretched, a sweet smile
danced on his wrinkled face.

After church we ended up at our
favorite spot. I sat across from him in our usual booth. His eyes drooped more
than usual and his skin hazed over with a pale hue, deepening his wrinkles. He
looked old and tired.

“Are you feeling alright?” I cupped
my hands around his cold fingers.

Dazed, he looked down at our entwined
hands and bobbed his head as if convincing himself all was well. “I am, dear. I
feel fine. Don’t you go worrying about me.” He stretched his neck over to the
kitchen. “Where is Berta with that coffee?”

I clutched his cold hands. “She’s
coming.”

My grampa aged before my eyes. New
wrinkles had formed every time I visited him. His voice grew hoarser. His hair
turned wirier, and his eyes glazed over more and more. I didn’t want him to get
old. I wanted him to be that strong man he always had been right up to before
he had his prostate cancer and mild stroke last year, and before his eyesight
started leaving him.

“So, how’s your newest story coming
along?” I asked him.

He cleared his throat and opened his
mouth to speak. Sometimes it took him a few tries to get the words out. This
time, he got it on the first attempt. “Well, I’m having a hard time figuring
out what to do with the cat in this one, you see.” He laughed and his whole
face lit up. The color restored and his eyes brightened. “The lead cat is so
darned pesky, I don’t know what kind of journey she’s going to take me on
next.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dragger.” He cleared his throat
again and pointed his eyes at me. “You know why?”

I scooted up taller in the booth.
“Tell me.”

“Because she drags the other cats all
over the darned house in search of clues. You see, she’s leading the
investigation of a string of robberies occurring in the residence.” He said
this with the seriousness of a person recounting truthful details of a
real-life criminal investigation. “She even has the family dog involved in this
one.”

“The kids are going to love it.”

“I’m just a silly old man who likes
to tell silly stories,” he said. “These kids don’t want to hear them. I do
think they enjoy the chocolates I toss out to them, though.” He winked.

“This one sounds like your best story
yet.” I doled out encouragement that a year earlier he would’ve been offering
to me instead. Life had turned on us in a flash. For a lifetime he led me, and
then suddenly our roles reversed. Out of nowhere the shifting wind came in and
toppled the status quo, leaving us grasping onto naked branches and praying the
wind would be gentle and keep us close to the roots that defined us.

“My best ones have long been written,
dear.” He patted my hand, and then looked out through the window at the
tourists strolling by. “I think I’m going to try an omelet today instead of my
usual.”

“Good for you, Grampa. Maybe I’ll do
the same.” I swallowed the angst building in the back of my throat and blinked
away the tears that stung my eyes. When Berta arrived I told her, “We’re going
to try something different today. We’d like two omelets.”

“Would you like to go really crazy
and add some wheat toast to those orders?” she asked with a happy tune.

“Grampa?”

He looked away from the tourists and
back at me, the haze returning to his eyes. “Yes, dear?”

“Want to be different and add wheat
toast to this order?”

He nodded to Berta. “Yes, let’s add
some variety.”

She jotted this down. Before sweeping
away towards the kitchen, she shared a knowing smile with me. We shared this
smile every Sunday. We’d been ordering these unique omelets for over a year now,
and God bless Berta for pretending we’d just ordered something different.

Things like rolling fields, ripe
crops, bountiful fish, and nights in front of a roaring fire with guests at The
Rafters used to keep him going. Now, an omelet served as the greatest thrill of
the week.

He picked up the newspaper left
behind by the last person in the booth. He squinted. “How I miss reading the
newspaper.” He tossed it to the side and looked out over the breakfast crowd
instead.

I wanted my old grampa back. This one
sat prisoner in a sad fog. This one was chained to an existence that trapped
him and his big spirit in an old person’s body. This one held all the secrets
to living a great life in the reserves of his brain, and I feared I’d be unable
to access this information before long.

Why did life treat great people like
this? Why did it steal all of their greatest attributes and abilities and
sandblast these gifts into a corner in the back of their minds, rendering them
incapable of sharing them with others?

Somewhere between those beautiful
gray eyes of his still remained the smartest, coolest, most enthusiastic man
I’d ever known.

I would reignite that spark in him.

The doctors told me to keep him
excited, active, and talking to keep him young and spirited. So, I did. Every
Sunday I picked him up at his apartment and took him to Sunday mass where he
led me to the first pew, directly in front of the statue of Mother Mary, and
insisted that I pray for the entire half hour before mass began. After, we ate
our “unique” omelets, and then we got crazy and visited the senior center.

Despite being weak, he still carried
his smile around for all to enjoy. The women, some ten years younger, sat next
to him and talked his hearing aid off. Some even envied me when Grampa would
pay more mind to me than them. They vied for his attention, and my grampa, God
love his good soul and wit, would wink at me and roll his eyes, as if saying
‘these freaking women are crazy.’

He sipped his coffee, slurping it
like a little kid. His eyes puckered with each sip. “This is good stuff today.”

I sipped mine with equal thought.
“Hmm.”

We ate our omelets and drank one more
cup of coffee before I braced to ask for his help. I studied the situation. If
I asked him for a loan to hold me over, I’d repay it to him along with the
other three hundred I still owed him. “Grampa, can I ask you a favor?”

He sat up taller, leaning in with his
good ear. “Yes, of course, dear.”

His eyes twinkled. He loved being
needed. He always did. Loaning me money lifted his spirits and put a glow on
his face. “Can I borrow a little more money?”

“Of course.” He dipped his head.
“I’ve still got some back in my apartment.” He leaned in and whispered. “I keep
the rest of it in my purple wool sock.”

“Grampa, be careful who you say that
to. You don’t want someone taking advantage of you.”

“Yes, dear.” He bowed his head like a
child.

I reached out and cupped his cold
hands again. “We’re going to have fun today, you and me.”

He looked up and beamed, showing off
his white dentures and beautiful smile. “What are we waiting for then?” He
jiggled his hands from mine and slid out of the booth anxious to have some fun.

I lived for these moments. He needed
me just as much as I needed him.

* *

Once Bentley and Grampa reunited
without claws and scratches, I returned to my apartment with five hundred
dollars. Grampa had insisted the money needed spending. “It’s just sitting idle
doing nothing anyway,” he had said.

I knocked on queen bee’s door and
handed her the money. “This isn’t gonna cut it,” she said. “I’ve already rented
the attic apartment.”

“You just kicked me out last night.”

“I’ve got bills to pay.” She slammed
the door in my face.

I glanced at my yellow car, my new
temporary home, and surrendered to it.

* *

I zoomed down the interstate going
eighty on my way to nowhere. The open road scared me a little this day. My
heart pinched a little tighter. A strange and uncomfortable pain pulsed at my
temples. Suddenly, the horizon stretched out much too far with nothing in the
middle to cling to. I treaded alone in this open sea, fighting to stay afloat.
All that strength that I started out with vanished and left me panicked,
flapping my legs like a duck without a mission, pointing towards some far away
land that, for the first time in life, I feared I wouldn’t be able to reach.

I pulled over to the side of the road
and sucked air into my lungs, willing it to end this dizzy spell. I turned on
the radio and breezed through commercial after commercial in search of a song,
a debate, a joke, something that would calm me. I landed on Bette Midler’s
“Wind Beneath My Wings.” I pulled over, closed my eyes, placed my hands on the
steering wheel and bowed into it, resting my heavy head.

My mother’s pretty face flashed
before my eyes. She waved that spatula she always danced around the kitchen
with. Her bobbed haircut swung in unison. She loved Bette. I could see her,
singing along, sashaying her hips, flipping eggs and pancakes, asking me to
wipe the table down fast before my stepfather came down for breakfast.

My mother mastered feigning strength
among her biggest weaknesses and fears. She put on a good act, appearing in
control one second, and the next bowing down to her stupid husband’s insults.
She clung to a life of misery, for what? For solace? For safety? For comfort?

Then she died along with my dream for
us to live life out on the open road, just the two of us, driving down the interstate
singing songs loud and eating popcorn and drinking sodas.

The loss of that dream strangled my
chest. I pressed harder against the steering wheel. I wondered if my mother’s
life would’ve been different had she gone through something like being homeless.
Would she have risen to the challenge?

I sat up and stared at that blank
horizon again. “I think you would’ve risen to it, Mom,” I whispered. “You just
didn’t give yourself a chance.”

From deep within I started to sob. I
continued until the horizon turned into a royal purple and the faint circle of
the moon appeared as my guide to carry on with my travels and never settle for
comfort, for security, or for someone else’s ideals.

* *

A few hours later, I parked along the
Blackstone River Park and ate a sandwich that I bought with my grampa’s money.
I played with my cell, searching my Twitter feed for entertainment. As far as I
could tell, I could enjoy this simple pleasure for about another week before my
cellphone carrier pulled the plug on me, too.

As I read a quote about living with
reckless abandon, my cell rang. It was Nadia. Like a fool, I answered her like
I’d been waiting my whole life to hear from her. “Hey, you!”

“Um—hey, you.” Her tone was demure.
“I was wondering. Um—See here’s the thing, er—I could use your services again.
Whatever you did the last time worked. So, any chance you’ll be available this
weekend to give me another one of your ten-minute massages?”

A dizzy stupor rose in me. “See, and
you doubted me.”

“Hmm,” she replied without much
commitment. “I’ve got this terrible kink in my neck and it keeps me up and
stresses me out. Nothing is working. Hot water, heating pad, muscle cream, none
of it.”

A sweet current rushed through me.
“So I was right.”

“About?”

“You are uptight,” I teased.

“Do you always grill your clients
like this?”

I laughed. “Client? So you’re my
client now, huh?”

“If you’ll have me?” Nadia’s voice
pulled on me.

I held the cell away and drew a large
breath. “Same place?”

“Well, don’t you have a massage
studio?”

I looked around at my shiny, black
leather interior. “I’m a traveling masseuse.”

“So you mean you go to people’s
houses and such?” She sounded alarmed.

“Wherever they’re comfy.”

“Isn’t that kind of dangerous for
someone like you?”

“Someone like me?” I asked.

“You’re a sweet, innocent woman. We
live in a crazy world filled with people who might enjoy taking advantage of
that.”

“Oh, I can handle myself,” I said
more defensively than I expected.

“I didn’t mean to insinuate that you
couldn’t. I’m just curious as to why you’d put yourself in such a vulnerable
position?”

“Well, I’m looking for a place,” I
answered truthfully. “For now I’m trying to get into corporate settings. Desk
massages.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“It’s going just fine. I’ve got a few
leads. People seem interested. You know how the business dance goes.”