Whisper Me This(47)
Following a hunch that a woman with a gun like that, loaded and ready, might want to know how to shoot it, he’d asked the question. He’d like to ask how long she’d been coming to the range but knows better than to show curiosity. Still, he’s earned a couple of important pieces of intel. Leah Addington has not been shooting guns for her entire life, and Brent has reason to believe her death might be from something other than natural causes.
Tony isn’t sure if he should tell Maisey—what would be the point? She was obviously shaken up by the fact that her mother even had a gun. What he wants to know is why a woman like Leah had a gun in the first place.
“Her daughter and granddaughter are at the house,” Tony says. “Any reason to believe they’re in danger?”
“Nothing specific. Look, since she’s dead, I’ll tell you this. She came in here a few months back and asked if someone could teach her how to shoot. Determined little woman. Didn’t talk much. Certainly didn’t look like the gun-owning type. But something had made her twitchy. Asked questions about shooting to kill.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out, then.”
He wonders, though, as he walks out to his car. What kind of threat could appear out of the blue to spook a woman like Leah? Briefly he weighs the possibility that Walter is the danger, but just as quickly discards this. You can tell a lot about a man by the way his daughter treats him.
Tony will have to keep an eye on the family, just in case. A wave of pleasure sneaks up on him at the idea of spending time with Maisey. It’s tempting to entertain it, to justify it, to tell himself it will do no harm. But he doesn’t believe this. Not really.
A real relationship is a thing he cannot allow. He will help her as if she was one of his sisters, but that will be the end of it.
Chapter Fifteen
Dad sits in a chair, looking mindlessly toward the window, clearly lost inside himself. When we arrive his gaze comes around to us, but there’s no light in his eyes. Elle hugs him, installs herself on the edge of his chair, and begins the sort of chatter only a twelve-year-old girl is capable of. Every word draws him back to us, away from whatever mindless zone he’s been drifting through.
When an aide brings in a dinner tray and sets it up for him, he actually eats most of it. Every time his hands forget what they’re doing, Elle reminds him.
It’s the dessert that does us in.
He takes one bite of hospital apple pie and makes a face. “What is this supposed to be?”
“Pie,” Elle says, poking at the rubbery crust and crunchy apple pieces with the fork. “At least, I think it’s pie.”
“That’s not a pie,” he protests. “We’ll get Leah to make you a real one, just as soon as I get out of here.”
My mom’s pies are legendary. With his words I taste an intoxicating bite of salty, tender crust, tart but buttery sweet apple, cinnamon, and brown sugar. It melts in my mouth but sticks in my throat.
There will be no more pies. Not one. Not like that. Nobody else, anywhere in the world, makes pies the way my mother made them.
Dad sees it. I watch the knowing steal a little more of the strength from his face, as if the very bones of his cheeks and jaw are being eaten away by my mother’s absence.
“I’ll make you a pie, Grandpa,” Elle says into the suffocating silence that follows his words.
His eyes travel toward her voice, hover, and then find me.
“I want to go home,” he says, for all the world like a lost child.
I have to tell him that I live in Kansas and don’t have room for him. I have to tell him I’ll be selling the house. That there is no home to go to.
But the words are a giant, prickly cactus lodged in my throat. My heart hurts, in a truly physical way, an ache that frightens me with its intensity.
A long silence falls. Tears track down his cheeks, but he doesn’t weep, and the silent agony does further damage to my own heart. I cannot begin to comfort his grief; it’s too massive for me to even touch.
Elle feels no such limitation. She settles herself into his lap, wraps her arms around his neck, and leans her head against his chest. “I love you, Grandpa,” she says, and the words shake loose both his pain and my own, so that before I even know it’s hit me, I’m bent over at the waist, torn apart by weeping I can no longer hold back.
I cross the space between us and kneel in front of his chair, burying my face in his knees. His weeping and mine make a rhythm, two pieces of a whole. The third and final piece is missing, will always be missing, but in that moment we begin to heal around that loss, bringing Elle in to complete the circle.
Little by little the intensity of my grief eases. My sobs soften and slow. I hear my father’s breath following this same pattern, and soon I am aware only of our breathing—mine, Elle’s, and my father’s.
I push myself back and sit on the floor, wiping my face with my sleeve and looking around for much-needed tissues. Dad’s arms are around Elle, his cheek resting on the top of her head. His face is wet, his eyes red. She, too, is smudged by tears, and if my heart was not so newly emptied, I would feel a fresh pang at the weight of knowledge and maturity I see there.
Too late I wonder if I should have sheltered her from this. Greg would have. My mother would have. But then I feel the warm tug of connection between her heart and mine, mine and Dad’s, and for the first time in my life it occurs to me that maybe my own weird way of being in the world is right after all.