He almost smiled at that. “She always did.”
“Why didn’t you use that money on your own house? You’d been saving for years, she said.”
“Because a house can wait,” he said simply. “She couldn’t.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that for a while.
“I want you to know,” he added, “I never once thought of that money as something I’d get back.”
“Not through the will. Not through anything.”
“I wasn’t keeping score.”
“I don’t think love like that works if you’re keeping score.”
I believed him.
Fully, for the first time since I’d walked into that kitchen eight months earlier and decided, on sight, exactly who he was.
“Can I ask you something else,” I said.
“Why did you say yes? To marrying her, I mean. Twice she asked, you said.”
He was quiet for a while, looking out at the rows of headstones.
“My mother worked herself half to death for me,” he finally said. “Nobody ever did anything like that for her in return. Not really. Not until Margaret.”
“When Margaret asked me to marry her, some part of me understood it wasn’t really about romance in the way you’d expect. It was about her wanting to finally give something back to my family that couldn’t be quietly returned to sender.”
“A scholarship, she could send anonymously. Groceries on a porch, she could leave without a name attached. But this — being family, actually being tied to us — that had to be something she asked for out loud.”
“I said yes the second time because I understood, finally, that refusing her again would have been its own kind of cruelty.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way before.
I’d spent eight months assuming the arrangement ran one direction only, and it had never once occurred to me that my grandmother might have needed something from him just as much as anyone assumed he needed something from her.
The house sat mostly untouched for the first few months after the funeral.
I couldn’t bring myself to sort through her things.
Not right away.
Daniel, true to everything the letter had described, never once asked to be involved in that process.
Never assumed any claim to anything inside those walls.
I invited him back eventually.
On a Sunday afternoon.
Mostly because I didn’t know how to go through fifteen years of my grandfather’s old tools in the garage without someone who’d actually cared about the man who once owned them.
We ended up spending the whole afternoon there.
Him telling me stories his mother had told him about my grandfather’s final weeks.
Small things.
The songs he used to hum.
