Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
HOPELESSLY ROMANTIC
HUDSON
“You must be Louisa,” she says, before I can open my mouth.
Grams has never waited for a formal introduction when a direct one was available.
She extends both hands and Louisa takes them in both of hers with the easy warmth she gives to everyone.
Everyone, I've noticed, except me, or the version of me she constructed before this week started dismantling it.
“I've heard so much about you,” Louisa says. “Can I call you Grams?” It’s such a sincerely sweet question that I’m glad it’s not directed at me. And I know the answer. She has been Grams to anyone close enough to me to know her. Which nowadays is really only Lucas and Paola.
“Only if you want me to answer.” Grams says it to Louisa, but the look she slides to me over her shoulder is one I've been on the receiving end of since childhood. I give her nothing in response. This is also a language we’ve been speaking for thirty years.
The dining room at Highland Place has high ceilings and good light, because its residents need it to read the menus, though the staff knows Grams’s order and mine without asking.
Louisa asks the server about the specials.
I come here weekly, and five minutes after Louisa meets her, I now know that her name Tiff is not short for Tiffany with an ‘a’ but Tiffiny with an ‘i’, which is why she goes by Tiff.
Louisa has all this information before we even have waters on the table.
Louisa asks Tiff what she thinks is best, listens with her full attention, and orders it.
When the food comes out, it looks better than what I ordered.
I sit across from them both and become, within seconds, an audience.
This is not a complaint. Far from it. They begin with weddings, not ours, which I’d called ahead to navigate so Grams wouldn’t surface it cold at the table, but my grandparents’.
“The year was 1959,” she begins, and Louisa is enraptured as she pops another piece of squared cantaloupe in her mouth.
It’s a story I’ve heard enough times to recite.
They were going to elope, but at the last minute decided not to.
They didn’t want to run off and get married in secret, even if people objected.
She tells Louisa about the dress she made herself from a pattern because the one she wanted cost thirty-five dollars she didn’t have.
My grandfather in his father’s suit, too broad in the shoulders.
Her sister picking flowers from a neighbor's garden the morning of, without asking.
All of it told with the happiness of someone who has never once resented the imperfection of it.
Louisa absorbs every word. Not politely, genuinely, leaning forward, asking for more.
She asks follow-up questions about details Grams hasn’t reached yet, which requires Grams to double back, which she seems delighted by.
I watch Louisa give this woman her complete and total attention and I think about all the times her voice came through the wall between our apartments and I made myself be annoyed by it, because the alternative was something I didn't have a plan for.
When here she is, delighted, on a Friday morning, with a mediocre breakfast, completely enthralled by my grandmother.
“What are your plans, my dear?” Grams says, so crisp and intentional. She has never stirred a pot she didn’t mean to stir. “Shall we make it a big affair?”
Louisa’s eyes find mine across the table. Panic as she calls in the agreed-upon lifeline.
“Louisa's family is in the UK,” I say, smooth and immediate. “We’re going to the courthouse.” I look at Grams with the expression that means, ‘I know exactly what you’re doing.’ She looks back with the expression that says, ‘I don't care.’
“Don’t let him tell you he can't afford something if you want it,” Grams says to Louisa, ignoring me. “Look at this nice place he keeps me. He can afford it.” She pats Louisa’s hand. “I’ll even throw in thirty-five dollars for a dress, if you need it.”
Louisa laughs, and it’s the realest one I've heard from her, and fuck if it isn’t something I need to hear again.
Which is saying something, because she is not a person who laughs quietly, or by half measures.
This one comes from somewhere deeper, not just the air in her lung, but deep in her person.
This pulled some version of genuine joy that feels too intimate to experience.
It’s different than the ones she uses in conversation, those are warm and easy, distributed freely to anyone in her radius.
But this? She didn't plan. And that’s why it overtakes me.
I have spent six months being annoyed by this woman.
I have a list, a mental one, itemized, with supporting evidence.
Filed actual complaints. All the escalations and midnight doorway arguments that I told myself I was winning, and which I was, objectively, losing in ways I didn't have the vocabulary for yet.
I told myself the sound of her through the wall was an inconvenience, so many times and with such consistency that I believed it, the way you believe anything you repeat enough.
But right now, the only thing I want repeated is her laugh.
“I appreciate that,” Louisa says, patting Grams's hand before turning to look at me.
“I already bought a dress. Though I have had a front row seat to his finances lately, and between the Nerds habit and the eggs for dinner—” the smile she gives me is nothing short of diabolical “—which have apparently gone up in price—I’d say thirty-five dollars might actually be what we're working with for the flowers.” It's sticky with sarcasm as it drips down each declaration.
“The flowers,” I say, “are handled.” I take a sip of my coffee. Louisa looks at me for just a heartbeat longer than the joke requires, then she turns back to Grams.
“I actually never wanted a big traditional wedding.” The word traditional sounds different coming from her.
The idea of it, handed to her early and then quietly set down.
“I never really wanted traditional anything, honestly. I’d absolutely trip over my own feet walking down the aisle and take out whoever was waiting at the end.
” She turns to me then, with a smile that is warm and shockingly playful, and for me. “Isn’t that right.”
I hold her gaze. “With a cup of tea in hand.”
“Exactly,” she says. “And no one there to catch me.”
“I’d catch you,” I say. It comes out like a fact, which, I'm realizing, it is. But if there’s something I learned six months ago, it’s that I should have dodged the tea, and caught the girl.
Grams watches us with the face she used to wear when I'd come home from school and try to pretend a day had been fine. She was never fooled then, either.
Louisa looks at me like she's deciding whether to say the thing or the other thing, she picks the other thing.
“I have always liked the idea of the people you love most in a room,” she continues, “celebrating something as rare as finding the person you love most in the world. I think that's why I love a sitcom wedding episode on television. There’s always the formula. There’s this core group of people who've watched the main characters fight to get to each other. Something always goes wrong. Someone always does something that redefines what seemed possible. And everyone who loves them gets to be in the room for it.”
“You're such a romantic,” Grams says. Not an accusation, just a statement delivered with something that looks very much like recognition.
“Hopelessly,” Louisa says. “And sometimes more than is good for me.”
After breakfast, we head to Gram’s apartment, and I become even more peripheral to the conversation than I was.
I want Grams to like her, she already likes her, I can tell.
And Louisa needs this too, in a way I don't think she’d name if asked.
And one I hadn’t considered, but I’m glad of it now.
She's been alone here longer than anyone should be, and not just physically.
She told me some of it, not in those words, but in the spaces between the ones she used.
The geography of her family that loved her in name but not practice, never being what they wanted from birth.
Except of course, her brother. Whom she loves, just at a distance.
Grams knows something about filling that distance. She’s been doing it for me for thirty years. I watch Louisa settle into the wingback chair with ease, and I slip quietly down the corridor to get the other thing I came for.
Grams’s bedroom is exactly as it has always been, no matter how many times she’s moved.
The mahogany vanity table positioned under the window so the morning light hits the mirror at the angle she requires.
Her hand cream and the small glass dish for rings when she applies it.
A photograph of the two of us I don't remember being taken, which is my favorite kind.
And the dark-green jewelry box, gilt edges worn soft from decades of handling.
I called her yesterday. Told her we were coming, told her I wanted her to meet Louisa, and there was a pause on the other end that was not surprise but recognition.
“I've been wondering when that was going to happen,” she said.
Not whether. When.
She never met Claire. I didn't bring her.
It took weeks before she even realized my Friday mornings looked different than every other day.
I told myself it was because things were uncertain, because we were still figuring it out, because the timing wasn't right.
All of which were true and none of which were the reason.
The reason was simpler and less flattering: I knew what Grams would see, and I wasn't ready to hear it.
I lift the lid of the jewelry box. The velvet envelope beneath the tray is dark burgundy, thinned at the fold from however long it's been waiting there.
I can feel the shape of it through the fabric before I open it.
It was my grandfather's first significant purchase. He bought this ring on a payment plan from a jeweler and proposed again, the year after they were married, when he could afford it. He stood in the kitchen of the apartment where they lived with their daughter. One oval ruby, deep red, set in a thin band of yellow gold that's been worn smooth and bright by sixty years of daily life. It’s not a diamond, it was never meant to be flashy. It was meant to be real, because it’s the only kind of beauty that holds up over time.
Ironic if you think about it, the reality of this artifact to symbolize something so real, slid on the finger of my fake wife. It doesn’t matter to me how fake this marriage is. The reasons behind it are real, and that has to count for something.
Grams wore it every day until her fingers made it impossible.
Then she kept it in this box, in this envelope.
And when I called, she offered it to me.
Demanded I take it. ‘I always thought I'd give it to you when the time came, and then, I worried that when the time came, I didn’t know you would be there to greet it.’ I stood in my kitchen and didn't say anything, just accepted the same truth about myself that I’ve been told, and I’ve known, for some time.
Which was its own answer. She knew, because she always knows.
After thirty years of watching someone build walls, it gives you an excellent understanding of where the doors are.
From the sitting room, I can hear Louisa's voice. Not the words at first, just the cadence of it, the rise and fall, the rhythm that I know now means she’s doing something more than speaking. It’s something I have no trouble recognizing through walls. She's reading, out loud.
She's taken one of Grams’s books, the historical romance I keep saying I will read just so she has someone to talk to about it.
Apparently Louisa has. And she's reading it out loud, doing the voices with full commitment, her audience of one not diminishing her performance. If anything, it’s amplifying it.
I stand in the doorway of the bedroom for a moment, not going back yet. I know why she’s here, what I’m giving her. It’s paperwork and a fiction we have agreed to maintain for however long it takes.
Here is what she's giving me, and what she is giving me is so much more than a fucking apartment.
I close the bedroom door quietly behind me and walk back down the corridor.
I join them, and Louisa is perched on the edge of the armchair with the book open in both hands.
Grams is in her usual chair, turned fully toward her, hands folded, entirely captivated.
Louisa is mid-scene, and she doesn't look up when I appear.
But Grams does.
On Wednesday, we have an appointment at the courthouse. Someone to sign a certificate. That's all it is.
But it doesn't have to be only that.
I cross to the small settee and sit down, and I don't interrupt her, and I don't look away. She continues reading through the end of the chapter.
Grams holds Louisa's hands when we leave. “I've waited a long time to meet you,” she says it directly, I don’t think Louisa realizes just how literally she means it. Louisa bends down to kiss her cheek and her hair falls forward from behind her ear and she doesn’t fix it and Grams reaches up and does it for her, tucking it back, holding her face just a second longer.
The drive home is quiet, peaceful. I called the office and told them I’m going to be working from home today, delaying my start, because we ended up spending more time with Grams than just a few chapters.
A ring is in my pocket that she doesn't know exists. She thinks we’re getting married on Wednesday. We are. That part will be true.
But all week I've been making decisions based on what this arrangement requires. What it needs to look like, what it needs to hold up under. But now? There’s something I have to do, and I can’t justify it for strategy alone. I’ve tried, and the justification doesn’t hold.
My future wife, I think. Nods off in a twelve-minute drive back.
I sit with it in the dark of the parking garage, in the quiet of a car I'm in no hurry to get out of. But I do eventually, because no matter what, I can’t stay suspended in this moment.
She doesn’t even realize it is anything more than a nap in the car.
I walk around to her side. I open the door carefully, and I say her name, and I watch her come back to herself— slow and blinking and completely without defenses.
Enough, Hudson. It has to be enough. But even I know, standing here, that I'm fighting with a wall, my own, one I put up, and one she has no problem fighting her way through.