Tears fogged my glasses. “Me too,” I croaked.
She smiled, sad and full of pain. “I wish I could tell you that was going to change, say it would get better with time, but that’s not true. And I never lie to you. I don’t tell you everything though, because I’m a woman of many talents and just as many secrets. Ones I keep like baubles to hand out to you when you need them.” She paused. “I’m being metaphorical right now. You’re not getting any of my jewelry until I croak. I need it all.”
I choked out a hysterical and tear-filled laugh.
“But I’m talking about little pieces of my life I’ve collected and kept, despite the pain in doing so, in case they might help my beautiful and tortured granddaughter.” She sipped her wine. “And as much as it hurts to remember, I’m glad I have to, because it means good things for my Lo. The best. And it’s in the shape of a rather delicious man, if I do say so myself. Shirtless was more than impressive, so I can just imagine him pantsless.” She winked at me.
I rolled my eyes. Of course my grandmother had to get lewd in the middle of a heart-to-heart.
“Beautiful he may be,” she continued, “he’s broken. Dangerous. Any fool can see that. And your grandmother is no fool. I don’t just mean those scars and that motorcycle cut. That’s just surface. It’s nothing compared to what lies beneath.”
She took another sip and I thought on how much my grandmother saw. And my heart hurt because I knew that if she saw that much in such a short amount of time, she was battling more pain than I’d realized. Because it was almost impossible to see true pain—ugly, true, visceral pain—unless you knew what it felt like.
“I loved a man like that once,” she said, her voice quiet.
I jerked. “Grandad?” I asked, squinting and trying to remember the blurry man from the photos of him where he always seemed to be surrounded by cigar smoke and wearing a frown.
Grandma rolled her eyes. “Heavens no. I despised your grandfather,” she said conversationally.
I blinked. “What?”
“Ugh,” she groaned like a teenager. “He was such a bore. I would’ve ditched him the second I realized he had as much personality as a two-bit vibrator.”
I nearly choked on my coconut water.
Grandma continued, smirking. “Anyway, I didn’t ditch him because I had a little boy whom I adored. And I loved him more than I loved myself. Which is a feat. Your grandfather had much the same opinion. We lived different lives, with different lovers—me at least. Who knew what that piece of cardboard did?—and put on a united front. Obviously I still escaped as much as I could. Still was me. Your grandfather worked too often to disapprove too loudly. I tried to give your father the most exciting life possible, but as you’re aware, he wanted a stable one. And stability and excitement are not conclusive. I wore myself out giving him a pair of—on the surface—stable parents. So we gave him that until cancer took away his father, and then he did everything he could to escape his now fully insane mother.”
“He doesn’t know?” I whispered, thinking about my father’s resentment toward my grandmother, wondering if it would change if he’d known what she’d done for him.
Grandma shook her head. “Of course not. As I said, it’s a parent’s job to keep all the ugly secrets,” she said, confirming my hunch. “But we’re not talking about that,” she continued with a raised brow, as if she knew I was about to push the subject.
“We’re talking about Mick—not Jagger, though I may or may not have been there and may or may not be legally bound not to talk about it.” She winked. “But my Mick was it. You know the it.” She gave me a shrewd look. “He gave me my last time. And he gave me knowledge of how beautifully wretched love was. Because he had darkness. Different than your Gage, but then everything’s the same in the inky blackness, isn’t it? Painful, ugly, torture. It was torture loving him. But I would’ve lived it my entire life.” She looked at the windows, but she wasn’t seeing the ocean.
Her eyes sparkled with tears.
My grandmother never cried.
Never.
Not even at David’s funeral.
Well, I wasn’t entirely sure, as I wasn’t in a state to notice other people’s emotions since I’d been drowning in my own, but I was pretty sure.
And now she was almost crying.
“We only had six months together,” she whispered. “Six months of the most beautifully ugly love I’d ever experienced.” Her voice broke and she snapped her gaze away from the window with a force that told me she was yanking herself back from the past before it swallowed her up. “And I lost him. In something as utterly common and cliché as a car accident, of all things. Someone ran a red light. He died on impact. Thankfully, I guess, since his life had been so full of pain that it would’ve been cruel if his death was too.” She leaned forward and topped off her wine from the bottle on the table.