This Close to Okay(51)

“Tell me about them.”

“I asked you first.”

“I asked you second.”

Tallie scrunched her nose up at him. “My dad’s mom was a quilter and a visiting nurse. Made the best pound cake in the entire world. My mom’s mom worked at the greyhound racetrack. She smelled like violets and drank her bourbon straight,” she said.

“My kind of people,” Emmett said. “Did they live here? You spent a lot of time with them?”

Tallie nodded. “Lionel and I spent most of my childhood summers at my maternal grandmother’s house with my cousins while my parents worked. She lived in the West End. Okay, seriously, I’m done! Now, you.”

“So yeah. My grandmother Ginny and her sisters were beekeepers, which was equal parts fun and terrifying,” he said. The pub waitress set down one brown wicker basket of Irish soda bread, another filled with sourdough. She slid softened shamrock-foil rectangles of butter across the table and asked if they’d need more time.

“I’ll have the fish and chips, please. And so will he if he likes fish and chips,” Tallie said to the waitress. “Do you like fish and chips? They have the best. It’s my favorite,” Tallie said to him, not needing to look at the laminated menu flashing and catching green light as she handed it over.

“I’ll take the fish and chips,” Emmett said, loving how easy Tallie had made it for him.

(The waitress’s name is Kelly. Her name tag has a shamrock on it. She’s wearing slip-on sneakers. Green. Tallie is pretty and red-lipped at her side. Some of her hair is down. She put on makeup, dressed up a little. “Tunnel of Love” by Bruce Springsteen is playing. An American bar…even an Irish pub…isn’t an American bar if they don’t play at least one Bruce Springsteen song a day.)

“Beekeepers! I love it,” Tallie said across from him. She opened her eyes wide, put her napkin in her lap, and got her knife out. While she buttered her bread, Emmett talked, buttered his own.

“Virginia is my grandmother who taught me how to play gin rummy. We called it Ginny rummy. She was my father’s mother,” he said. “She and my grandfather Samuel had a scandalous interracial relationship. It’s his Bible in my backpack. He gave it to my grandmother, and she left it to me.”

Tallie listened and ate while he talked.

He told her about his grandfather’s family owning the main grocery store in town. How his grandmother sold honey to him. How they fell in love, got death threats. How somebody had attempted to burn the grocery store down.

“Yeah. All that good stuff. This, of course, is southeastern Kentucky late ’40s, early ’50s. They wanted to get married but obviously couldn’t. And then my grandfather was sent to Korea.” He told her his grandfather was killed in 1953 in the Battle of Pork Chop Hill at about the same time his grandmother found out she was pregnant with his dad.

“My grandmother wrote him a letter and told him but wasn’t sure if it got to him. She didn’t know if he ever found out she was pregnant,” Emmett said truthfully.

For all the lies he’d told, finally telling more of the truth was calming, like unclenching a tight fist. Emmett’s grandmother had kept Samuel’s obituary behind clingy photo-album film. He and his dad had gone to the big public library to read the grocery-store-fire news article on microfiche. Emmett had leaned in close, staring at his grandfather’s face, the tenderness in his eyes. He looked at it for so long that his vision blurred, lost to the gray.

“So sad and fascinating. All of this. I want to hear everything. Your family history is like a movie I want to watch and a book I want to read, Emmett,” Tallie said, rapt. His fake name had hopped from her mouth like a cricket.

He imagined his real name smoking from her lips, floating up and away. Some other time, some other place, he’d be real into Tallie. She was so damn sweet and really cared about people. So often, the dark cloud that followed him threatened to wipe him out entirely, making it hard to think ahead more than a matter of days. But. Tallie was the kind of person to make him believe in Monday morning.

Emmett relaxed in the booth as she studied his face like a treasure map. Why couldn’t he stop telling her things? He kept talking and talking. Told her about how hippie-peaceful his maternal grandparents were amid the hot, bubbling ignorance in his hometown. And more about Christine’s family and how it was well-known small-town lore that Christine’s dad had pined for Emmett’s mom when they were younger and used to tell everyone he was going to marry her someday.

“He was borderline obsessed with my mom before she married my dad. Even named his boat after her. More than once he cornered and tried to kiss her, but my uncles did a pretty good job of chasing him off most of the time. The biggest fight my dad and Christine’s dad ever had was when they were in high school and my dad caught her dad spray-painting his brand-new car. Her dad got out a bright orange n-i-g before my dad clocked him,” Emmett said.

“Sheesh,” Tallie said.

“Yeah. Just a lot of really stupid stuff. Christine’s dad always thought my mom should be with him. It was messed up that he felt jilted before, but especially after she married my dad…a half-black man. Then, boom, they had me. So Christine being with me? Another, even bigger nightmare of her dad’s come true,” he said, knowing how dramatic it all sounded. It was like a Shakespearean tragedy; his and Christine’s families loathed each other, and in a flash, his young bride was dead.