He turned his head toward me. I wasn’t sure if he’d be confused but he gave me a smile and said, “There you are!”
Then he said the most surprising thing. He said, “It’s you I’ve been looking for all this time.”
Well, I couldn’t help but feel flattered about THAT.
“Here I am,” I said.
Then he said, “Sit here, young lady, beside me.”
So I sat.
Then Grandpa said, “You know I never meant to hurt you.”
And I was like, “Whaaaaaa?” Inside my head. But what I said out loud was, “You didn’t hurt me. You’ve never hurt me at all.” I tried to make my voice soothing, the way Mommy does, and Granny too, when they’re talking to him. I had the feeling that Grandpa had me confused with someone else. At that point I stopped being flattered.
Then you know what Grandpa said? He said, “In the end, you see, there was simply too much at stake. I had no choice.”
I felt it was very important at that moment to say exactly the right thing. Mommy has said that if Grandpa is confused about something it’s better to JUST GO WITH IT rather than try to correct him.
Grandpa looked so sad that I said, “I understand. It’s okay.”
Then he said, “What’s your name?” I thought about saying one of the names I wish was mine. Tallulah. Brittany. Clarissa. But in the end I came out with the truth.
And you know what Grandpa said? He said, “A lovely name, Abigail. I feel as though I knew someone else with that name once...”
And I was like, “Duh. You do. Me, your oldest granddaughter.” But I didn’t say that out loud because I was still trying to GO WITH IT.
Then I remembered that everyone would be looking for him so I said, “We need to go, Grandpa.” And I stood up and held out my hand and he put his spotted old hand into mine and I tried to be okay with that and not look too closely at the skin.
I reminded him to be careful on the rocks. You know how slippery it can get, with the seaweed.
Then hand in hand we went up the steps and across the grass and to the back porch.
Phew! Sorry this letter is so long! As Granny would say, we had ourselves a day.
When are you coming? Please ELUCIDATE.
ELUCIDATE means to EXPLAIN OR MAKE CLEAR. I learned that from Granny’s dictionary.
Love,
Abigail
This is how the story begins. In 2006 Steven McLean was visiting his college girlfriend, Aggie Baumfeld (Boston College, go Eagles!), at her apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, where she lived whileprocuring her MBA at MIT’s Sloan School. Aggie resided on the corner of Newbury Street and Clarendon, in a sweet two-bedroom with an eat-in kitchen.Nobodyin grad school had an extra bedroom and an eat-in kitchen, but Aggie’s rent came straight out of the pocket of her grandfather in Minnesota, a real estate magnate.
On this particular Friday night Steven McLean, a copy editor at theVillage Voice,left New York on the 4:05 Amtrak Acela—a splurge, he usually took the bus, and if he took Amtrak it was never the Acela—which landed him at Back Bay station at 7:16. Approximately seventeen minutes later he was using the spare key Aggie had made for him to let himself into her apartment; thirty seconds after that, he was listening with shock, dismay, andpossibly (but really only later would he realize this) a modicum of relief to noises of ecstasy coming from the larger of the two bedrooms, where Aggie and her fellow corporate finance proseminar classmate, Mikhail, were working off some steam after a successful presentation.
Where to go, after such a discovery? His Acela ticket was a super saver fare, nonrefundable, no changes allowed.
As luck would have it, three of Steven’s Boston College buddies—Murph, Finn, and Scooter—were living in a train wreck of an apartment in Brighton. Steven exited Aggie’s place just in time—he knew her well enough to know that she was close to orgasm—and put out a distress call. Of course Steven could crash with the Brighton guys! Murph, Finn, and Scooter—that’s right, those were their names, like a trio out of a sitcom—took Steven in, propped him up with three shots of Jägermeister, and repaired to the Venu, where a group of six Fordham girls were knee-deep into an evening celebrating the bachelorette party of the first of the group to get married, a Cambridge resident named Marissa. They’d started, of course, with dinner at Dick’s Last Resort, because that was what you did if you got married before the age of twenty-seven in those days in Boston.
The maid of honor was none other than one Louisa Fitzgerald, one of the most promising students in the history Ph.D. program at Columbia University. The bride-to-be was wearing—wait for it—a white visor with a shoulder-length veil attached. Louisa had donned her favorite boot-cut jeans and a 1930s blouse she’d bought at a vintage shop on Broome Street. And yes, thank you very much, shewouldlike to dance to “Hips Don’t Lie” by Shakira, featuring Wyclef Jean, with the brokenhearted, adorableVillage Voicecopy editor she met in line for the bathroom.
At the end of the night, phone numbers were exchanged.
Fast-forward through Aggie’s tearful, unaccepted apology, the phone calls between Louisa and Steven, the courting, dates one through fifteen, the meeting of each other’s families. Louisa’s father, a justice on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, was intimidating; her mother, Annie, was classy and warm. Steven had a big, close family in Philly: three brothers who worked with their father at his plumbing company: McLean and Sons. (The oldest brother, Robbie, joked that when Steven decided to go white-collar on them Steven’s dad thought about naming it “McLean and Sons Minus One.”) The second oldest, Joe, had married his high school sweetheart and produced three sons. Nick, a year younger than Steven, never told Steven that when Steven brought Aggie home for Thanksgiving junior year she’d put her hand on Nick’s thigh under the table during the dessert course, before the Kennedy-esque football game the brothers, their father, and a peloton of cousins played every year.
New York City, 2007. Steven and Louisa got an apartment in a postwar building on West 111th Street. Louisa finished her classes at Columbia and taught undergraduates while she worked on her dissertation. These were busy, blissful days—Louisa was on a fast track; she was going to be one of those students, as rare as a Bornean orangutan, who completed her course work and her dissertation on time and was ready for the job market.
