Fitz feels every bit as confused as Lucy looks. His son has a daughter… and that daughter is Lucy?Lucy! HisLucy. His… his friend, he supposes. And all this time she has been his granddaughter! Hisgranddaughter. No wonder she has Millie’s exact hair coloring—no wonder he’s been so mixed up. He feels a bit unsteady then and reaches for his walker.
“Oh, Fitz,” Lucy says. “Let me help.”
Before he can stop her, she pulls his walker closer to him. Her warm hand rests on his for a moment as she helps him find his grip. He stares at her, wondering how he possibly missed it, when he can so clearly see now that she is part of him.
Perhaps he didn’t miss it, though. Perhaps there has been something between them all along, something he has not been able to put his finger on, something he has not been able to comprehend. He recalls now that she said she was living with her father temporarily. And then he remembers that Lucy’s mother has died.
Oh, he thinks.Oh.
Realization unfolds within him, rearranging his understanding of the past.
“You’re really my grandfather? Is that true?” Lucy asks, shaking her pretty head in astonishment, tears shining in her eyes.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Fitz says. “But it does look that way.”
“Bad news?” She laughs. “No. I have a grandfather! And it’s you!” She puts her arms around him, hugging him as best she can with the walker between them. Fitz cannot remember the last time he was hugged like this. His throat feels thick with emotion.
“I can’t believe it,” she says. “All this time, you’ve been my grandfather, and I had absolutely no idea. You’re Mr. Fitz!”
“Actually,” Fitz says, “I’m Mr. Barnes.”
“Arthur Fitzpatrick Barnes,” Gregory says. He’s stepped slightly away from them. “He’s always gone by ‘Fitz.’?”
They both turn to Gregory. His face is hard and pale like something left out too long in the cold. Lucy reaches toward her father and rubs his arm. “Should we sit down?” she asks, looking back and forth between them, her expression turning serious to match theirs.
There are others walking along the paths, and Louis the Lump, shuffling around with his granddaughter, looks over at Fitz with a surprised expression, undoubtedly shocked to see that he has somefamily of his own.I’m as surprised as you are, Fitz is tempted to shout to him, but manages not to. As Lucy leads them deeper into the rose garden, the noise of the party slowly fades.
“How long have you lived here?” Gregory asks as they round the fountain. His son’s voice, Fitz notes, is terse. He doesn’t blame him for it. Not one bit.
“Oh, nearly a decade.”
“And before that?”
“The house on Spruce Street.” It was the house that he and Millie brought Gregory to from the hospital as a newborn, the house in which Gregory lived until college. And then Fitz stayed there, living with the memories of Gregory and Millie long after they’d both left him.
Fitz has so many questions for his son, but each one is caught in his throat. This sort of trepidation is not a familiar feeling for him. He is a man who has always spoken his thoughts. But now… He doesn’t want to make Gregory angry. After what he remembered yesterday when he smelled Lucy’s roses, everything has changed. He wants to tell Gregory and Lucy this, but he does not know how to begin.
Lucy leads them to a bench along the far wall of the rose garden. Silence falls over them. Three generations of Barneses, sitting right in a row, with Fitz in the middle. It’s a startling thing. Fitz draws in his breath and releases it. He turns to Lucy, thinking he’ll work his way up to facing his son.
“I see your mother in you,” he says. And he does now—it’s the shape of her eyes, if not the color. And the slant of her nose. And something else, something intangible.
“You met her?” Lucy asks, leaning toward him, and there’s something in her expression that tells Fitz that she knows the answer.
“Once,” Gregory mutters bitterly.
Fitz turns to face his son. “More than once, actually.”
Surprise flickers over Gregory’s face.
“She came here, didn’t she?” Lucy says excitedly. “She came to see you!”
Fitz nods. “She wanted to mend the rift between your father and me.”
“What are you talking about? When was this?” Gregory demands.
“Oh, seven or eight months ago, I think. She only came that once. She said she was going to talk to you, Gregory. She wanted to bring you back with her, and she wanted to know if that would be okay with me, if I wanted to see you. I said yes, I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you very much.” She didn’t mention that he had a granddaughter. Maybe she thought that Gregory should deliver that news himself. Fitz swallows. “She never returned. I assumed that you told her that you wanted nothing to do with me. I didn’t blame you a bit for that, Gregory. I still don’t.”
There is a stretch of quiet, and then his son says, “Nell never told me that she came to see you. But I know that our estrangement was very hard on her. She blamed herself. Nothing I said could convince her it wasn’t her fault.”
