She's Up to No Good(41)

“Mom said it made her want to get in the car and come up.”

“She’s not invited.” She reached across the kitchen table and put a gnarled hand on top of mine. “This is our trip.”

I found myself smiling. It felt good to be wanted instead of being the prodigal daughter, returned home after her failure of a marriage to live off her parents while trying to build up the courage to return to the world.

I also realized I desperately wanted to know more about this place. When I was little, she’d told me stories about growing up in Hereford, but they were all anecdotes about her ridiculous family, and I often confused them with my mother’s battered copies of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the All-of-a-Kind Family books, as well as the movie Avalon. Now, her tales were so blurry with age that I couldn’t remember which were real and which I had seen elsewhere.

“What happened to the cottage?” I asked.

“I told you. That woman sold it.”

“But why didn’t the rest of you buy it?”

She sighed. “She sold it without telling me. And Bernie and Margaret . . .” She trailed off.

“Bernie and Margaret?”

She clapped her hands once. “They’re gone now. Leave them be.” After rising with an effort, she made her way to the kitchen cabinets, which she began opening and closing, one by one.

I came to help her. “What are you looking for?”

“This.” She pulled a vodka bottle from a cabinet and waved it triumphantly.

I tried to take it from her, but she had an impressively strong grip on the bottle. “Mom said you’re not allowed to drink.”

Her eyebrows rose almost to her hairline. “Your mother,” she said icily, “isn’t here and doesn’t get to tell me what to do.”

“But your medications—your heart—”

“My heart is fine, and I haven’t died yet, have I?” She took two glasses down and poured a healthy splash of vodka into each one, then went to the refrigerator, where she pulled out the orange juice. “And if you’re going to be all nosy, you’d best have a drink with me while you do it.”

I tried to stay firm, but she thrust one of the glasses into my hand, then made her way to the front porch, leaving me little choice but to follow.

She was unusually quiet as she sipped her cocktail.

“Grandma?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Are you okay?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I—we didn’t come up here for you to die or something, did we?”

She laughed. “Where did you get such a morbid streak?” She took another drink. “No, darling, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. And even when I do, don’t you think I’m ever leaving you. I’m going to be that little devil sitting on your shoulder telling you to get into more trouble. You always worried too much about what other people thought to have any fun. That’s one of your problems.”

“One of them?”

“Yes. Would you like me to tell you what they all are?”

I shook my head. I already knew my flaws much better than she did. And I didn’t feel like having them listed by someone who pulled no punches.

“What were you being all quiet about, then?”

“The screens.” She gestured around us. “They’re the one good change. The mosquitos are something fierce otherwise. If you sat outside when we were young, you’d be up all night scratching.” She smiled at some memory. “Of course, we did it anyway.”

“Did Grandpa come here with you?”

Her expression changed. She was thinking about the before time, when it was her parents and siblings, not her own children and family.

“He used to come up for his two weeks of vacation. And every other weekend or so. But I drove up myself with Anna, Joan, and Richie in June, and we stayed through August every summer.”

It never occurred to me that the summers they spent in Hereford meant being away from my grandfather for the better part of three months. And I wondered again if there had been something fishy going on.

Wasn’t he suspicious of you and Tony? was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back with a sip of the screwdriver. Even before I knew about Taylor, I would have been suspicious at that much time apart had it been Brad—especially if it was in his hometown with his first love. But despite knowing she was an inveterate liar, I believed that she didn’t cheat on my grandfather. Maybe I just wanted to believe it and not tarnish my memory of them as happy. But moreover, there was something playful when she lied, and she had been serious about that.

She met my grandfather in college. I knew that much. But I didn’t know how she went from planning to marry Tony to marrying Grandpa. She was telling me stories in a painfully linear fashion. I was never one to skip ahead in a book, but had this been one, I would have.

“You and Joe,” she said, changing the subject as if she could hear my thoughts. “You sound like you two clicked this afternoon.”

“He seems nice.” I hesitated. “Why isn’t he married?”

She grinned over her drink. “Who says he’s not? Besides, you’re not interested.”

I threw my hands up and quit, letting her lead the conversation back to the stories she was willing to tell, getting up to fix us a second drink at her behest, though I made them significantly weaker than the first ones on purpose. I didn’t want hers to clash with her medications, and I wanted a clear head the following day.