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Dick pointed a finger in their direction. “That.” He cleared his throat and reached toward my hand. Thinking better of it, he awkwardly changed directions and wiped his hand on his jeans. “Gilbert Wainwright, he was my great-great-, well, a couple of times great-grandson,” Dick said. “Which would make me your great-great-, several more times great-grandpa.”
My jaw dropped. The room seemed to list like a ship’s deck under my feet. I studied his face closely. I could see the slope of my mother’s nose on his face, the irregular bow to his lips. “Holy shit!”
Behind me, Andrea slapped Jane’s shoulder and hissed, “I told you so!”
Jane yelped and said, “I thought she would find Dick being a relative a preferable alternative to him wanting to sleep with her. Damn it, Andrea, get a cold rag. I think Nola’s going to faint.”
“Nope. Panic attack,” I wheezed. “My whole life is one long series of barely averted panic attacks. I’m going to sit down.”
My knees buckled as I leaned onto the bar stools. My face seemed so cold all of a sudden, and my stomach roiled. Jane exclaimed something about wanting the news to be “a surprise, not a bad talk-show reunion!”
“Are you OK?” Dick asked as my head swam.
Dick was my ancestor? Mr. Wainwright may have been a little disheveled, but he seemed respectable. But Dick? Sometimes I had to fight the instinct to clutch my purse to my chest to keep him from snatching it.
I couldn’t keep taking shocks like this. I’d lived for years believing that my life was arranged in a specific, if slightly bizarre, way. And now these little bombs of revelation kept dropping on my head and changing the way I saw myself, my family, my whole damned life. Part of me wanted to throw that stupid bottle of synthetic blood at his head and tell him not to speak to me again.
And yet there was the curve of my cheek and the odd long line of my mother’s nose in this man’s face. And I felt the loss of my nana all over again. She would know exactly what to say in this situation, and here I was as stunned as a half-dead fish. Whatever momentum I’d built toward the stool shifted, and I knew I was on a collision course with the floor. A pair of cool, strong hands caught my elbows and held me upright. And the next thing I knew, my face was pressed against the worn, clean cotton of Dick’s T-shirt.
Andrea appeared at his side with a bottle of water and pressed the cool plastic into my hand. Dick apologized over and over as he helped my bum locate the seat.
“If it makes you feel any better, for weeks, Dick has been running himself ragged, fussing over stuff like ‘Is that chair safe enough for Nola to sit in?’ and whether he should baby-proof his house,” Jane mused. Dick glared at her. “What, it’s not my fault that you’re a wide-open channel when you receive emotionally charged news.”
I stared at Dick. “Baby-proofing?”
“I’ve never been able to spend much time around my kin while they were living,” he said, shrugging. “And you look so fragile.”
“And so fixing up the house I’m living in now . . .”
“Is a much-needed business investment,” he assured me. “Which just happens to ensure your safety and comfort. While we’re talking about the house, you can take your rent checks back. There’s no way I’m going to charge my own granddaughter to put a roof over her head.”
“I want to pay my own way . . . what do I call you now? It seems wrong to call you Dick.”
“Grampy?” Jane suggested with a wry grin. Andrea threw a coffee filter at her head.
“I don’t know,” Dick said, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the slightest bit of pink-tinged moisture was gathering at the corners of his eyes. “You could call me Grandpa if you want. Or Papa. Whatever makes you happy.”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with any of them.”
“It’s going to take some time for everyone to adjust,” Andrea said. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it all out. But if you call me Granny, I will smack you so hard your eyes will cross.”
“You actually sound quite a bit like my granny,” I mused, ducking when Andrea tossed another filter my way. “Though I think if anybody has to the right to smack anybody, it’s me. I can’t believe you two kept this from me! I thought—well, Jane knows what I thought. How could you?”
“It wasn’t our place,” Jane said. “Andrea wanted to let Dick find his own way to tell you, which was clearly a mistake. And I’m not related to you, and no good has ever come of me blabbing secrets that don’t belong to me.”
“Also, it wouldn’t have been nearly as funny,” Andrea said.
“Shut it, Granny,” I said as Andrea made rude and unladylike gestures. “And while I appreciate the fact that you’re fixing up the house, none of this is necessary.”
Andrea snorted and gave me a wink. “You haven’t even seen the Christmas presents.”
“If I go out back and find out you’ve bought me a pony, I don’t know what I’ll do, Dick.”
Ruffling my hair, Dick gave me an even better gift. He handed me a family tree he’d diagrammed on graph paper, including birth and death dates, marriages, and children. It showed that Gilbert Wainwright’s father, Gordon Wainwright, was the son of Albert Wainwright, son of Eugenia Wainwright, a laundry woman who had worked on the Cheney family farm when Dick was human. She had Albert in 1879 but died a short time later.
“When Eugenia had the baby, I was young and mortal . . . and stupid. I let my parents talk me out of claiming him, even when his mama died,” he told me, a sheepish, forlorn expression wrinkling his handsome face. Andrea rubbed his back and nudged him a little, encouraging him to continue. “Albert grew up, and I was able to watch him from a distance. He married, had a son. His son married, had a son. And I watched over them, all of them, watched them live their lives, enjoy their successes, make their mistakes. I never made contact with them,” he said. “Not until Gilbert.”
“How did you make contact?”
