“Ellie girl,” he said.
“Grandpa, you’re supposed to be resting.”
“Hush a minute and let an old man talk.”
I hushed.
He looked at me for a long moment with the particular, deliberate focus of someone choosing their words carefully, weighing each one before committing to it, which for Grandpa was unusual enough to be almost alarming. It settled a different kind of weight in my stomach, slow and cold. My grandfather was not a man who chose his words carefully. He said what he thought, plainly and directly, and he relied on the people who loved him to forgive the delivery, which they always did, because he was Gus Granger, and that was simply how he was built.
“I’ve had a good life,” he said, at last. “A real good one. Your grandmother.” His voice softened on that, the way it always did when he spoke of her, even now, even all these years later. “The store. You.” He paused, something moving across his face, something private and unguarded. “Especially you.”
“Grandpa—”
“I’m not finished.” Not unkind. Just firm. “I don’t have a lot of fears about what’s coming. I’ve made my peace with most of it. But there’s one thing that sits with me.” His hand tightened around mine, just slightly. “I can’t stand the idea of leaving you on your own. That’s the thing I can’t make peace with.”
The walls closed in around the two of us, and the soft, relentless beeping of the monitors seemed to grow louder. I kept my expression steady through an act of will that took everything I had, every scrap of composure I’d managed to hold together since the moment I’d walked through the hospital’s sliding doors.
“I’m not on my own,” I said. “I have friends. I have the store. I have?—”
“You have people around you,” he acknowledged, his voice patient and unhurried. “That’s not the same thing.” His eyes held mine, clear and completely certain, the eyes of a man who had spent his whole life looking at things plainly and calling them what they were. “I want you to have someone. Someonewho’s yours, and who you’re theirs, all the way through. The way your grandmother was mine.” A pause, weighted and deliberate. “I think you already know who that is.”
I didn’t answer that.
“That boy has been showing up for you since you were eight years old,” Grandpa said. “He drove here tonight without you having to ask, because that’s what he does, and because I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t have asked him.” His thumb moved across my knuckles, slow and deliberate, the same hand that had held mine crossing streets and steadied me through every hard thing. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, sweetheart. I’m just asking you not to let fear talk you out of something real.”
I was going to hold it together. I had decided that before I’d walked through this door and I was not changing the plan now, not in front of him, not when he was lying in that bed looking smaller than he had any right to and talking about things he shouldn’t have to be talking about yet. I was Gus Granger’s granddaughter. I would hold it together.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. My voice came out steady. I was quietly proud of that.
He gave me a look that was gentle and unapologetic in equal measure. “Maybe not today.”
Which was not the reassurance I’d been reaching for.
I looked down at our joined hands. His, mapped with the geography of a man who had never been afraid of hard work. Mine, holding on with everything I had and hoping it didn’t show. Twenty-three years of Sunday dinners and slow Saturday mornings at the hardware store, of being the person he’d chosen to pour everything into when he could have done otherwise, when no one would have blamed him for finding it too much. He’d never once made me feel like a burden or an obligation. He’d made me feel like the whole point.
And now he was lying in a hospital bed, asking me to be brave about Daniel Costello, of all people, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or press my forehead down against the mattress and sob until I had nothing left.
I did neither. I lifted my eyes and met his.
“I hear you,” I said, which was the most honest thing I could offer him.
Something in his face settled, like a small knot quietly coming loose. “That’s my girl.”
We stayed like that for a while, his hand in mine, not talking, while the monitors kept their rhythm and the hallway sounds drifted in from under the door. At some point his eyes grew heavy and his breathing evened out into the slow pattern of sleep, and I stayed anyway, watching the rise and fall of his chest with the focused attention of someone taking inventory of something precious.
In and out. There and here.
Still mine, for now.
When I finally got up and slipped out into the hallway, Daniel was there. Not hovering, just present, leaned against the wall a little way down from the door with his phone face-down in his hand and the expression of a man who has been doing nothing in particular on purpose.
He looked up when I came out.
I looked at him across the hallway, this person who had been showing up for me since the third grade, and the full, impossible weight of everything my grandfather had just said pressed against the inside of my ribs.
“How is he?” Daniel asked.
“Sleeping.” My voice held. “He, um.” I stopped. “He had some things he wanted to say.”
