You, With a View(14)
Theo removes his hat and tosses it onto the table, running a hand through his hair. His temples are damp. That shouldn’t be so hot. “Since February. He was in LA, but my grandma died last fall. He was getting lonely, so I moved him up here.”
My heart sinks so fast the world tilts. Paul’s gold band flashes in my mind. “I’m—I’m sorry. About your grandma.”
Theo shifts, uncomfortable. “Thanks. It’s not the same as what you’re going through. I mean, it was very sad, obviously, but she married my granddad when I was a kid, long after he and my dad’s mom divorced. Both of my biological grandmothers are still alive, but I’m not close to them. Not like I am with Granddad, anyway.”
“Grief is grief. You don’t have to qualify it.”
“Some grief is different, though,” he says, looking out at the yard. “You can be sad but be okay. If my granddad dies, you know—”
He stops, like it’s too painful to think about. That if a standin for the other word he can’t say out loud: when. I sense the same connection between him and Paul as what I had with Gram. That soulmate thing, the string connecting two people, longer than death, further than forever.
I want Theo to sketch out his family tree for me. I’m getting crumbs of so many different things, like the flakes still littering my lap, and it makes me hungrier. I know Theo is an only child, that his dad pulled him aside after every tennis and soccer match he attended, talking to him in low, intense tones while his mom watched. That he never looked happy with his son, nor with his wife when she intervened. Remembering that makes it hard to believe he came from Paul. Is that Theo’s grandma’s influence, the sternness Theo seems to have inherited, too?
I hate being curious about him. I’ve fought against it since the beginning. But I’m me and I need to know things, so I open my mouth to ask more questions. I barely inhale when he shakes his head, his expression shifting from melancholy to wry.
“Don’t make this earnest and uncomfortable.”
“No, totally. Emotions, right?” I pretend to gag. “Disgusting.”
He doesn’t respond, and a tiny, microscopic, very small part of me is disappointed. My blood runs faster in my veins when we talk. But surely that’s just irritation.
Theo stands, swiping a t-shirt from the chair at the head of the table. He eases it over his head, making it look like porn somehow. My body pulls tight.
One thing is certain: I’ll never figure him out. I don’t want to, and he’d never let me anyway. So I busy myself with brushing the crumbs from my lap, letting them fall to the ground. The birds can have them.
* * *
Paul emerges a few minutes later, a banker’s box in his arms.
“Wow.” I gape as he lowers the box onto the table. “We’re going to be here for a while, huh?”
To my right, Theo sighs. I give him a droll look over my shoulder, where he’s parked himself against the railing, but he’s not looking. He’s been ignoring me since our near-brush with human emotion, grimly tapping out messages on his phone.
Paul takes Theo’s seat next to me. “Some of this is your grandmother’s. We saw each other once after we separated—before I sent the letter you found—and she gave me things for safekeeping.”
“What do you mean, for safekeeping?”
He sits back in his seat with a hum. Birds sing around us, tucked into trees. Somewhere nearby, a lawn mower buzzes.
Finally he says, “It’s no surprise you have so many questions, or that you don’t know much about your grandmother’s life prior to her marriage to your grandfather. Our relationship was not well received by her family, and when she left school, she didn’t leave with many reminders of our time together.”
“So you kept all this for her?”
“For us,” he corrects gently. “When our relationship ended, it wasn’t acrimonious. We wanted to make sure it’d always be a lovely memory.”
“But she made it a secret,” I say, watching as he begins pulling items from the box.
“No.” Again he corrects me. It’s still soft, but there’s steel behind it. “Whatever life she and I wanted, planned, or talked about was never going to be. Kathleen keeping a box of reminders of how she’d defied her parents would’ve prolonged her grief. Her parents and brother knew the whole story once it was over. I imagine it was initially too painful for her to recount further, and by the time you came into the world, well . . .” He smiles. “Life goes on.”
I look for pain or anger on Paul’s face, but all I see is nostalgia mixed with affection, softened with time.
“Your letter to her mentioned an elopement,” I venture.
“Yes, we did make plans to elope.”
“But it never happened. Because of her parents?”
“It was . . .” He pauses thoughtfully, his gaze going to the sky. “Not just that issue, but her parents were certainly the biggest hurdle to overcome.”
“Why didn’t her parents like you?”
He laughs. “Where to begin? We had one mess of a dinner with our families where everyone made it clear where they stood on a variety of subjects, including whether Kat and I should be together.”
“What were the other subjects?” Theo asks.