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I nearly give in to my need to console him by rushing over to hug him when a single tear falls down his right cheek. It’s hard to watch this otherwise hardened man show his emotions to a captive audience instead of behind closed doors where it’s safe for him to break down without witnesses. But if I stop speaking now, I’m not sure I’ll have the courage to continue.
“Are you okay?” I ask, needing confirmation before I get into the harder details.
He’s become stilted, rising up and becoming somewhat composed, but I can tell that he’s already started filling in a few blanks.
“I’m not sure if ‘okay’,” he air quotes the word as he utilizes it, “is the right term I’d use. Not yet anyway,” Grandfather remarks. “But please, young lady, continue.”
“From time to time, the boys would come visit me, and more pieces would fall into place. Mr. Fitzgerald, my name is Shayne Fitzgerald, and I’m your granddaughter,” I announce, an incessant need to get that key component out consuming me until I could release it. I go on to tell him about life in the abbey, about our teachings, my solitary existence outside of Mera, how I always longed for family, but never let myself hope that I’d ever get the chance to see them and tell them I’m alive.
Julius added things here and there, telling my grandfather some things he was already aware of, and clarifying other things that he wasn’t and had only had presumptions about. Like the fact that after blowing up their own clubhouse, the DreamCatcher men, women, and children have been living in a “safehouse”, for lack of a better word because there’s no way, even the Fitzgeralds, can be trusted with the insight about the underground city that’s been constructed underneath the Alvarez estate.
We give him a few minutes to himself as he stands up and begins pacing. Stopping along the way to look at me, shaking his head, he’d huff, curse underneath his breath, then continue walking back and forth behind the table. Once he wears himself out, he retakes his seat and nods my way.
I take that as he’s ready for me to pick things up at our current time. “I was never truly scared until my last meeting with the boys,” I inform him.
“What changed?” Grandfather inquires through a clenched jaw.
“They told me it was time for me to repay their kindness for saving me and do my part. Family duty, they called it. My role was to dutifully accept a marriage contract they’d made on my behalf,” I tell him.
“Who?” he counters, my grandfather’s eyes becoming beady, anger shining in their depths.
I shrug my shoulders because I don’t know. “I was never given that information.”
“Paulo Ruiz,” Julius declares, his body vibrating, hostility radiating from him.
“They wouldn’t! That’s blasphemous! Traitorous,” Geronimo hisses, banging his fists on the slab of the table. “They made a deal with our enemy? That’s a death sentence!”
Those words cause a riot to erupt. Things get chaotic, and Julius pushes me behind his son for safekeeping as Luca shoves Mera behind Kruger.
“I think your grandfather’s head is about to explode,” Mera whispers.
“He’s fixing to call for a bloodbath,” Gunner expresses.
“I hope you don’t have any emotional ties to your brothers, Shayne. Because their lives are fixing to be snipped,” Kruger states.
“They can take out all the Crumleys and I’d sleep easier at night,” I confide. I’m a firm believer that all life is precious, but there are some that should be snuffed out to keep innocents safe.
* * *
When cooler heads prevailed, my grandfather and I found a private space in the corner to get to know each other without prying ears. It almost feels like a confessional without the walls and curtained window between us.
“When this is over, I’d like for you to come and visit your grandmother. When she discovers you’ve been alive all this time, she’s going to mourn the fact that she never had the chance to watch you grow up,” Grandfather states. “I can speak for both of us when I say that we’d like to be in your life from this day forward.”
“I’d like that too,” I admit. “When it’s safe, Julius and I would happily accept any invitations to your home.”
“You and Julius, huh? Sounds like there’s more than friendship between the two of you.”
“He’s my everything, Grandfather.”
“Grandfather is so aloof and impersonal,” he mutters.
“What would you prefer me to call you?” I ask him.
“Nonno. That’s the Italian connotation for grandfather used in our homeland. It sounds more intimate and less superficial,” he answers.
“Alright.Nonnoit is,” I compromise. It is more personable, but I wasn’t sure we were at that stage just yet.
But if it makes him happy, I can allow this. It’s kind of nice to not be so clinical when it comes to my blood kin relations. Before, he was a person on paper, but nothing more.
