“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.
“Well, over appetizers, my mother got going on women taking a more prominent place in the workforce, which Kat’s homemaker mother thought was shocking. She already wasn’t thrilled that her daughter was at college. She wanted her to get her MRS degree.” Paul eyes us. “Do you know that phrase?”
I nod. “They wanted her to find a husband.”
“Right you are. I just wasn’t the one she was supposed to find,” he says with a little smile. “The most insurmountable thing, though, was that my father and I were outspoken about the US military taking action internationally. I even went so far as to say I’d be a conscientious objector if things in Vietnam ramped up. It wasn’t something her career-military father or her brother, who’d gotten a Purple Heart in Korea, wanted to hear.” He shakes his head. “In hindsight I should’ve bitten my tongue when the subject came up. Kat had prepped me not to bring up anything political in nature, but my temper got the best of me. That night was enough to set the path to disaster, though Kat and I didn’t give up afterward.”
“I see.”
And I do. My memories of my great-grandparents are fuzzy. I was young when they died. But I do remember my great-grandfather was an old-school, solemn man who’d shoot puzzled looks at my wild hair and Thomas’s pink T-shirts, even as he let us crawl all over him during Thanksgiving dinner. My tenderhearted, progressively minded dad had a complicated relationship with his grandfather. Gram did, too. But she loved him deeply, and he doted on her, even though it’s clearer to me now that his love could be destructive. One of my most vivid childhood memories was Gram crying at his funeral while I clutched her hand.
My thoughts go to Paul’s letter, his acknowledgment of their permanent separation. With this new context, it breaks my heart even more for both of them. “You said in that letter you would love her your entire life.”
He nods. “I did, and I will.” He places a stack of pictures in front of me, but I don’t pick them up yet. “She was my first great love. I was hers, as well. But your grandfather was her last.”
“Who was your last great love?”
“My wife, Vera. She passed last fall, but we had twenty-three wonderful years together.”
I put my hand over his. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He pats my hand, his blue eyes watery. “I appreciate that.”
My curiosity over Theo’s other grandma—his biological one—is gnawing at me. But, given that she and Paul divorced, I’m going to assume it’s a story I don’t have a right to ask about.
Theo takes the seat across from us. His hat is back on his head, shading his eyes and any emotion lurking there. But I notice a distinct lack of surprise.
“Do you know all of this?” I ask.
“A lot of it,” he says.
“The marriage stuff, too?”
Theo says again, stoically, “A lot of it, I think.”
“How?”
His gaze darts to Paul before he squints off into the distance. “Kathleen wasn’t ever a secret in my family.”
I chew at my lip, wanting to ask more, but sensing I’m somehow pressing up against a bruise of Theo’s. His shoulders are tense, like he’s waiting for my next question. Like it’ll hurt to hear it.
I could push until he gives me answers or tells me to fuck off. God knows I want to know everything. But for reasons I don’t want to examine too closely, I let it go instead. “Let’s see what’s in this box, huh?”
“Dig in, kids,” Paul says, giving me a warm smile, as if I’ve passed a test I didn’t even know I was taking.
I start flipping through the stack of photos Paul handed me as Theo takes another. My attention splits between the images in my hand and the way Theo’s eyes scan each picture before he lays it carefully on the table and moves on. Occasionally his mouth will pick up in a half smile, and he’ll flip the picture so Paul and I can see it. Most of them are goofy photos of Paul, but some of them are gorgeous shots of Los Angeles, the UCLA campus, or the group of friends that start to become familiar as I move through my stack.
Paul notices that I linger over a photo of Gram standing in front of a fraternity house. She has one leg crossed in front of the other at the ankle and wears a mischievous smile. It could be me in the picture; our legs are long and lean, our smiles equally wide, a little crooked. Her bottom lip is even snagged a little on her left canine, like mine does. In this picture, she’s wearing my best-day smile. I know, deep in my bones, that when this picture was taken, she was happy.
It’s the power of photography. To capture it and let it live past the subject’s lifetime. To allow someone to look at it years later and smile along with them.
I press my thumb against the glossy paper, working against the moisture in my eyes and the lump in my throat.
“You look so much like Kat,” Paul says. I blink over at him, pulled out of my memories and hers. He nods his chin at the picture. “It’s almost uncanny.”
Across the table, Theo’s eyes trace my face.
“You and Theo do, too,” I say. “I actually can’t believe I didn’t notice the resemblance when I found the pictures. I spent so much time looking at them while I made that video.”