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Chapter Thirty-one
“Nana! Nana, where are you?”
Julia hears her grandson calling her from inside the house. “I’m in the garage,” she calls back.
Seconds later, the door separating the garage from the inside of the house opens and Mark appears, fresh out of the shower, his long hair hanging wet to his shoulders. “What are you doing in here?”
“Just going through some of this stuff,” she tells him, indicating the stack of old notebooks on the concrete floor beside the stool on which she sits. “Thought it was a good time to clean house.”
Mark drops down beside her, crossing one long leg over the other and lifting the top notebook into his lap. “What are these?” He starts flipping through the pages.
“Your grandfather’s lesson plans, mostly. From when he was head of the sociology department at the University of Miami.”
Mark scans several of the pages. “He must have been very smart.”
“He was.”
“I didn’t really know him that well.”
“Well, he wasn’t the easiest man to get to know. Not the easiest man, period. Rather like your father, in that respect.”
“But you always seemed so happy together.”
“Oh, wewerehappy. Not all the time, of course. We certainly had our differences. He could be a bit humorless at times. I could be quite stubborn. But overall we complemented each other nicely.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I do. But…”
There’s a but?Mark thinks, not sure he wants to hear what it is.
“Don’t misunderstand me, darling. I loved your grandfather very much. He was a good man. A very good man. Just that, since he died, well…how can I say this?” She looks toward the ceiling, as if the answer is floating somewhere above her head. “There’s no tension.” She smiles. “Do you understand?”
“I understand tension,” Mark says, and Julia’s smile widens.
“Is that why you smoke so much weed?”
Mark laughs. “What do you know about weed, Nana?”
“Weed’s been around a long time, my darling. Yours isn’t the first generation to indulge. Of course, in my day, we called it grass or pot.”
“And did you…indulge?”
“I may have allowed myself the occasional puff or two.”
“No way.”
“Oh, there’s lots about me you don’t know.”
“Tell me,” Mark says, laying the notebooks on the floor beside him.
“Tell you what?”
“Everything. Start at the very beginning.”
Julia leans back against the concrete of the garage wall, her mind doing a quick scan through her eighty-four years. “Well, my grandparents came from Russia and were either smart or just plain lucky enough to settle in Florida. My grandfather got a job as a traveling salesman; my grandmother stayed home and raised a family, two boys and a girl. The girl was my mother, Emma. She met my father through her older brothers, and they got married and had three daughters. I was the youngest. My father went into business with my grandfather, selling costume jewelry. They’d travel all week together, although they didn’t really get along very well, and come home weekends. Heard enough?”
“Not a chance. When did you meet Grandpa?”
