“And this one,” Grandma was saying, pointing at a page, “this is her first day of school. She refused to wear the dress I picked out and wore her mother’s rain boots instead. With shorts. In September.”
“Grandma.”
“Oh, you’re back! Come sit, I was just showing him...”
“I can see what you were showing him.”
“She had the chubbiest cheeks,” Grandma said to him, ignoring me entirely. “Everyone wanted to pinch them. She bit a woman at church once for trying.”
“I was three.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing. You looked her right in the eye and chomped.”
Finneas was looking at the album with an expression I couldn’t read. His finger was resting on a photo of me at maybe three years old, sitting on a man’s shoulders, both of us grinning so wide our faces were mostly teeth.
“That’s her father,” Grandma said, softer now. “Michael. Tallest man in Whitebrook. She used to climb him like a tree.”
“What was he like?” Finneas asked, and the way he asked it, leaning forward, his voice dropping, made me stop in the doorway because it wasn’t small talk. He wanted to know.
“Terrible taste in music,” Grandma said. “Worse cook. Burned water once. I didn’t think that was possible but he managed.” She turned a page. “He built that porch swing out there. Took him three tries. The first two collapsed the second anyone sat on them. Andrea’s mother said if the third one broke she was buying one from the store and he could live with the humiliation.”
“Did it hold?”
“It’s still there. Twenty-five years and it hasn’t wobbled once. He was bad at most things but when he got something right, he got it right for good.”
She said that last part looking at me, not at Finneas, and I knew it wasn’t about the swing.
He asked about my mother next. Grandma turned to a page near the back, my parents’ wedding photo, my mom in a simple dress with flowers in her hair, my dad grinning so hard his eyes were nearly closed.
“She was a vet,” Grandma said. “Had a practice on Oak Street. Every stray in a twenty-mile radius ended up at her door. Your girl gets that from her.”
“I’m not his girl, Grandma.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Andy. I was talking to him.” She didn’t look up from the album. Finneas had the good sense not to react.
“Andrea always loved animals,” Grandma continued, turning the page. “She doesn’t just love them, she collects them. As a child she brought home everything. Frogs, a bird with a broken wing, a snake once that I did not appreciate. I found it in the bathroom and nearly had a heart attack. She was seven and she looked me dead in the eye and said ‘Grandma, he was cold.’”
He almost smiled. I could see the corner of his mouth fighting it.
“The peonies in the garden,” Grandma continued, running her finger along a photo of my mom kneeling in the dirt, flowers everywhere. “Those were hers. She planted every single one. After the accident I couldn’t bring myself to pull them out. They died on their own a few years later. The soil changed or something.” She paused. “I never replanted them.”
Finneas was quiet, his eyes on the photo. Then: “Andrea used to talk about them. The peonies. How her mother grew them along the fence.”
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
Grandma looked at him differently then. Something shifted in her face, the interrogation softening into something more complicated. She closed the album and patted his hand once, brief, almost businesslike.
“You want more coffee?”
“Please.”
I stood in the doorway watching my grandmother pour coffee for the man who broke my heart, and the annoyance I was supposed to feel wasn’t there. Instead I watched him hold the mug she handed him with both hands, the same careful way he’d handled the album, and felt something loosen in my chest that I’d been gripping for weeks.
I told the therapy group about it on Wednesday.
“He’s been showing up every morning. Flowers, breakfast, Grandma’s tea. He asks me on a date, I say no, he says ‘okay’ and comes back the next day.”
