To find out if this family can even try to bury its bitter, ugly past.
“Well? Let’s hear it,” Mom says.
“Did you read it?” I ask.
She nods, then shakes her head. “Not all of it, of course. But enough. God knows, I was up half the night with it.” Oddly, she isn’t wearing much makeup today.
She rubs her eyes in a tired, soul-weary way I haven’t seen since childhood.
Ethan looks at me, practically vibrating with tension. Hattie puts a calming hand on his shoulder.
“And?” he asks.
Mom looks between us both.
“What I can’t fathom,” she says, her hands gripping the sides of the chair, “is why that ridiculous, tight-lipped old idiot had to send Margot on a wild goose chase looking for his feelings instead of sharing them while he stillcould.”
“Mom, that’s not fair. You sent back every letter he tried to give you,” I start, but she holds up a hand.
“But,” she says, “I never imagined him being so… honest, either. Or so eaten up with guilt.” She looks at Dad, who watches her with a soft, worried expression.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ethan growls, grabbing the small box by his feet and thrusting it at her. “Take a good, long look. He worked his ass off, trying to rebuild the baby shoes your mother made. If you read the journal, you know they lost the originals in the fire.”
Mom takes the box with a sigh and unfolds the loose cardboard on top. She looks down.
For the longest second, her face is completely unreadable.
Dad’s face goes white and he lays his hands on her shoulders.
Look, I still get mad at the way they treated us as kids.
The way we never felt like a priority, but there’s no doubt that they adore each other in their own weird way.
Learning Gramps forced them apart when they were young and Mom defied him and went back to Dad and he accepted the baby she’d conceived with another man in a reckless fling tells me how much love is sacrifice.
Loving Kane taught me the rest.
“All that guilt, all those years,” she hisses to herself. “It must’ve driven him mad. I’m not sure how he was ever good with you kids.”
“He was,” Ethan says sharply, leaving no doubt.
She’s right, itdidmake PopPop crazy.
He just hid his agony very well.
It’s obvious from his journal, from his obsession with the shoes he broke, that he was consumed with finding a way to repair the family rift created by his pride.
If only to regain a little of the deep, everlasting love he clearly had for my grandmother.
Half the entries in that journal were pondering what he could do to fix all the hurt he caused. Whenever he wasn’t journaling about his art collection or a day out on the water with us kids, he was bleeding.
Ink doesn’t need to be red to look like a murder scene, and this poor, damaged man died a thousand times. He relived losing his wife and his daughter over and over.
No, there won’t be any easy answers about why he makes everyone’s inheritance so difficult. That’s just the kind of tortured weirdo he was.
But he wasourweirdo, and I loved him.
Also, I can’t wait to find out what’s in store for my little cousin soon, last on the list to inherit his kind of crazy.
