Chapter 10 Cayce
CAYCE
I don’t bring soldiers or weapons to see my grandmother. I bring flowers, a driver who knows when to vanish, and a face the old ladies at the gate will remember as polite.
Nan earned the right to live without men in coats at her shoulder. She forfeits nothing because of her age, she just enjoys her freedom.
The neighborhood sits on the Salem line—old money that learned how to hide itself in cedar, glass, and well-tended silence.
The sign at the entrance doesn’t say retirement.
It says “Residences.” No vinyl letters, no clip-art sailboats.
Wide paths. Hydrangeas the size of a person’s head in the springtime.
Now there are leaves and a salt smell that cuts through everything and leaves the edges clean.
The guard waves me through when he sees the car. I roll the window all the way down and let November in. I haven’t slept enough. I don’t feel it. The edges are where I live.
“Ten minutes,” I tell the driver. “Walk the loop. If anyone parks behind me, call Tiernan, not the desk.”
“Yes, sir.” He doesn’t look in the mirror again. Good man.
Nan’s mansion faces the inlet. When her butler opens the door, I step out into a foyer that smells like polish, lemon, and old books. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear old lullabies playing through a sound system, and it carries like a memory.
I knock on her office door. Three knuckles, not too hard. You don’t pound at Nan’s door. You present yourself and see if she’s interested in letting you into her space.
She opens the door all the way with a smile on her face.
“Cayce.” She says my name like its own sentence and a benediction and, if I’m honest, like a warning.
Red hair that despite her age is still a little coppery, silver threaded through, cut blunt just below her ears.
Lines at the eyes she earned through years running our family at Pop’s side.
Fair skin with the last freckles of summer retreating.
She’s in a slate-colored sweater and a poufy skirt that should make her look big.
It doesn’t. The pearl studs in her ears aren’t showy.
They don’t need to be. Nan exudes power and class the way most people wear a smile.
“Nan.” I bend and kiss her cheek. “You look impossible.”
“And you look like a man who thinks he’s bringing me good news.” She narrows an eye. “Or bringing me trouble and calling it good news.”
“Both things can be true.”
“Come in,love, then, and show me which it is.”
Her place is spare and careful. Shelves. A sideboard with photographs lined in a row. A basket with knitting she pretends she doesn’t need bifocals for. A view that could turn a ship back to harbor.
“Tea or whiskey?” she asks, already moving to the kitchen.
“Both,” I say.
“That’s my boy.”
She pours tea into a white mug and whiskey into two small glasses and carries everything without a tray. She doesn’t spill. She sets the whiskey down by me and keeps the tea.
“Now.” She lowers herself into the chair across. “You asked to see me. You are here on a weekday. You are wearing a face that says the thing you want is already decided. So speak to me, let’s get it out of the way.”
I take the whiskey but don’t drink yet. “I’m getting married.”
“And is she a girl,” Nan says, “or a woman?”
“Woman.” No flinch. “Caterina Moretti.”
“A good name.” She turns it once in her mouth. “Italian. And a saint’s, if you were thinking to mock me with the irony.”
“I’m not mocking you.” I let the corner of my mouth move. Not a smile. “I wouldn’t waste it on you.”
“True enough.” She leans back and studies me the way she studies the sky before weather. “Is she the nun my sources say you defiled on your night of rebellion?”
My fingers go still on the glass. “She was making peace with God in a place with bad lighting and honest air, yes. But it was Halloween, and she was not a nun.”
“And you,” Nan says, “were making peace with your hands.” She tuts. “I taught you better than that.”
“I didn’t take anything that wasn’t offered freely.”
“You took her plans, I’d say. Her future, if what I’m told is true.”
“She changed my everything,” I answer honestly. “The rest is paperwork.”
Nan watches me, and for a second I am back to being a little boy at seven, knees scabbed, having fed bread to a dog that bit me, learning the difference between kind and safe.
She taught me that. She taught me the Rosary and the knives, the order of both, and when a boy should shut his mouth and let a woman speak.
“Tell me what you want from me,” she says. “Because you didn’t come for tea or permission.”
“I want your blessing,” I say. “And maybe your bands, if you give your blessing.”
At that she goes quiet. Not the quiet she uses when she’s offended. The quiet she uses when she’s listening past the invisible walls that we try to build to keep her out.
“You went to confession with her?” she asks, eyes narrowing as she starts to speak in riddles, using the catechism as a weapon. “You put your hands through the screen and took a vow you haven’t earned?”
“I put my hand out,” I say. “She decided what to do with it.”
“And did you put her on the altar like a sacrifice? Did you pull a girl bound for the church off her path so you could wash away your dirt with her?”
I take the hit. I don’t dodge. “I’ve used pretty women before like a man uses a strong drink, to forget the past. That wasn’t what this was. What it turned into.”
“Are you certain?” she says, pouncing. “Or do you like to polish words when the priest is listening?”
“I’m certain,” I say. “Because what I felt there wasn’t rinsing away my sin.
It was a moment of pure innocence and…revelation.
” I let the truth land between us. “I went in thinking I knew the shape of the earth. I didn’t, and I’ll start a war if someone tries to keep me from her.
From the peace that I found in those stolen moments. ”
She breathes out softly and lets her shoulders rest. “All right. I believe you can tell the difference. That is not the same as doing it. That girl will be inside your house and your story, not the church’s. She is owed more than your discipline.”
“She’ll have more than discipline.” I mean it the way a man means a bank account. “She’ll have what I don’t give anyone else.”
“And what’s that, boy?”
“Everything,” I say. It feels like a crime to say it out loud. “A yes on my lips for everything and anything she wants. A future with a family of her own, instead of a life filled with penance.”
Nan holds my eyes. The corner of her mouth ticks, not with amusement; with assessment. “You speak like you learned to think,” she says. “Well then. I reckon this is the truth and not performance meant to knock me on my ass. I can hear the difference.”
She sips her tea. Then she sets it down, shifts a little in the chair, and takes a breath.
“You know how I came here,” she says. “But you don’t know it from me. Think maybe it’s time you did.”
“Pop stole you,” I say. “He took you from a man who had your name on a paper and a bargaining chip to claim.”
“Not a paper,” she says. “A promise. A promise I made when I thought the world was as small as the lane outside the house and the cows I had named. Your grandfather came home on a leave with shoulders too straight and a laugh that made the windows shake. He danced with me at a wedding that wasn’t ours and told me I was going to America. ”
“You didn’t argue?” I ask.
“I argued like a woman who hadn’t met him yet.” She smiles, real. “He said, ‘Sorcha, I’m after you, and if you don’t come now I’ll have to come back and get you, but either way you’re coming.’ I said, ‘You’re some thief, then.’ He said, ‘I am. But I only take what’s mine.’”
I feel her words land in my chest a way I don’t enjoy. I keep my face neutral.
“And the other man?” I ask.
“He was kind,” she says. “Steady. A decent sort with decent land and a cow that gave more milk than the others. I could have had a life that would not have broken me. It would not have made me sing, either. Your grandfather wasn’t kind or simple.
He was loyal and fearless in pursuit of our life.
There’s a difference. He was not patient with the world but he was patient with me.
He left the military when his father died, and the job he inherited was not one with a pension and a gold watch.
He took me, yes. He made me cross the sea, yes.
He married me at St. Mary’s with his mother’s ring on my finger and his father’s enemies at the back of the church, counting the weapons and their chances at eliminating a future queen. ”
She stops and looks out at the water, as if the inlet could give back a decade if you asked right.
“He was not an easy man,” she says. “But the life we created was ours. The best kind that exists in our world. He made a bad thing into a roof, and he kept the rain off me and our children until the time came for them to take their place. He loved me like a sin and a sacrament wound irrevocably together. If you’re not planning to upstage that, don’t you touch that girl. Leave her to the church and to God.”
“I plan to upstage it,” I say. My voice stays low. “I plan to make what we build worth the enemies that try to steal her away.”
She lifts her chin. “And the enemies?”
“They’ll all taste pain at my hands,” I say. “But there’s one that I haven’t been able to destroy yet. One that could hurt her, and me, and everything.”
Nan’s expression shifts. “Blackvine.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t spit. She’s not a spitter. She gives the syllables the cold they deserve.
“Blackvine Ridge left your father sleepless and killed him in the end. It took three boys you grew with. It took a girl, too. And countless others we don’t even know about.
That place…” Her gaze grows distant. “That place was touted as a space to make the children of our kind ready for anything life threw at them. Instead it broke them. Took their—”
“I know what it took. I know what it destroyed.”