36
Giselle
I crunch into the salty,buttery bread and then the warm gooey cheese. The flavors are a mix of what must be a piece of soft goat cheese and some kind of herbed hard cheese that's been melted. A thin slice of tomato and maybe some honey hit the rest of my mouth, and I have to close my eyes. In all my life and my searches for the best grilled cheese, it’s always Henry’s that wins out and beats the last.
I wipe my mouth in between bites, just as he puts a small bowl of soup in front of me. He hasn’t said much since he hung up with Bea. Usually, that’s nothing new, his quietness, but after the shit-stain that has royally fucked my life, I’m surprised by his lack of questioning.
“It’s chilled gazpacho.” He leans back and reaches into the drawer across from where he’s leaning on the oversized island. “Spoon.”
“The person that I recognized is dead,” I tell him as I take another bite of the salty goodness.
He squeezes a lime into both of our bowls and then looks at me. “Can I ask how that happened? And, I assume it’s a good thing?”
He shakes a bottle vigorously and then draws a circle in oil over each of our chilled soups. I’m not sure why I find that sexy, but I do. I don’t know where he got all the ingredients to make this, but in all reality, I don’t care. This is exactly what I wanted without even asking. Without even knowing until it was in front of me. That’s the level of attention this man has paid to me. How am I supposed to walk away from him? How do I pretend like I’m not wide awake now?
“Bea was able to identify the man and track him to the airport this morning. The idea was that they’d take him in for questioning about suspicious paraphernalia that would have been planted in his bag, but—” I can’t hold out anymore; I need to take a bite of this soup. Once I do, I hum in appreciation. It’s so fucking good.
“Henry, this is so good.” He flashes me a big boyish smile and then digs into his bowl. He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he eats and waits for me to say more.
I take another giant bite of the heaven that is cheese and bread and continue. “He wasn’t in the mood to be questioned, apparently, so he pulled a weapon. Before he hit TSA too. I don’t know where he would have put it if he went through the line, but that’s moot at this point. Anyway, he tried to pull a hostage, but since the TSA agents were actually FBI, there was a whole shootout thing. And now he’s dead.”
I look up to find Henry staring at me with a spoon halfway to his mouth.
“That’s not where I thought you were going with this. That’s a lot happening at our small airport. Did anyone else get hurt?”
Forever the good guy. Of course, he’s worried about his people. His town.
“Nobody. The news is reporting it as a drug smuggling issue, but that’s the better angle. There’s no way they want Mikhail ‘The Tiger’ Semenov, who’s tied to the Russian Bratva, in the headlines, or being spouted from Dawn Danglewood or Mel Finnegan’s lips during the six o’clock news.”
He blinks, waiting for me to elaborate. He doesn’t know the details. The magnitude of what happened. Who it happened to, and by whom. He only knows the grit of it. The outcome.
Now is the right time to tell him the big picture. It’s time he knows the level of danger I’m still in and the magnitude of what happened all those years ago. He should have known this whole time while he promised to look out for me. If I had known...
“My pops was the best man in the world to me.” I smile at the thought of him. His deep accent and the way he’d laugh. I can’t hear it the same anymore, but I remember how it made me feel when I did.
“But by society standards, he wasn’t considered an upstanding citizen.” I take a sip of my water and put my grilled cheese down. “At the core of it, he loved me more than anything in the world, and that’s all that ever mattered to me. But my pops made a lot of friends. Many friends that I came to find out weren’t really friends at all.”
I shift in my seat. Uncomfortable with the fact that I’m about to say bad things about the man that raised me and loved me unconditionally. Henry can sense it, so instead of standing there waiting for more details, he comes around to my side of the counter. Somewhere in my few sentences, the man found two glasses and a bottle of wine. He pulls my hands toward his body and up, moving us through the living space and veranda to the outdoor daybed.
As I sit, Henry pours. “Most of this, I didn’t know until afterwards. The agents assigned to my case filled in a lot of the blanks for me, but I wasn’t naive. Just the opposite, in fact.” He hands me my glass of chilled white wine, and I take a sip.
Crisp. Light. A coolness to the warmth that surrounds us.
“You probably have figured out that I have a good memory.”
Henry nods and takes a sip of wine.
“I can remember everything. More than eidetic, but not as clear as photographic. I can do dates, times, memories, connecting people to minor details. Mostly jobs and hobbies, or favorite drinks, but not necessarily faces. But I’m good with details. And numbers.” I take another sip. “My pops was good with numbers the same way. I knew he gambled. I knew that money wasn’t supposed to be in paper bags throughout the house. I knew that my uncles and my cousins were not really related to us. It was something we said, because we were close, but really, they were all people who worked for him. He wasn’t in the mob, but he was as close to it as he could be without actually being in it. I think that’s what made him more intimidating to people. Respected. But I chose to ignore the parts I didn’t want to see.”
“You said, Bratva. How do Russians play into that?” Henry takes another sip and then pulls my legs into his lap. The same way he did that night at the bar. Dragging his free hand up and down my ankle and calf, the touch feels comforting. Lazy and natural. I want to purr, it feels so good.
“Our neighborhood was a melting pot of families. We grew up in a close-knit five-block radius of people who were never supposed to be friends, let alone as close as family.” I try to hold back the tears I know are just dying to swell to the surface. “My mom left when I was barely two years old and that left my pops with doing favors for people who would look out for me and keep me busy while he worked. He always said that we got a bum deal, but that I was the best thing to ever come out of his time with my mother. He’d say, “when life gave you lemons, that was life. Make the most of it, plant a lemon tree.” I laugh to myself at how silly it sounds. “He’d call me his lemon blossom.”
I watch as he realizes that the lemon tree I sent him years ago meant more than he even thought. A part of me always hoped for more with him.
“I guess you got that romantic streak from him, then,” Henry says.
I shrug my shoulder, because maybe that’s true, but there was nothing poetic about how he died. “He was a good man. Never the guy to forget unpaid debts or leave a promise unattended. He made sure that the people around us were taken care of financially. He worked numbers on tracks, at casinos, and within the trade routes he was in charge of at the time, and it caught up to him. A few threats that hit close, and he was working for the Italians, then the Russians. Hell, I think Bea even said he had a contact with organized crime in China as well. All of it was to line pockets. And he lined them well.”