Chapter 52 Hope
hope
The next ten days passed in a frenzy of activity.
Eddie and Ralph flew in and set to work making the house look like an HGTV makeover.
They put the furniture I wanted into storage, shipped the furnishings they and Gran had selected to California, and filled in the gaps with rented modern pieces and paintings, which gave the place a hip, eclectic look.
“This place looks absolutely stunning!” Lauren said when we took her on a tour of Gran’s home so she could photograph the place for the real estate listing.
“You can thank Hope for handling all the decluttering, packing up, and repairs,” Eddie said.
I swept my hand toward Eddie and Ralph. “And these two are the maestros of design.”
“There’s only one little thing you might want to fix.” Squinting, she held her thumb and index finger about a half inch apart.
“What is it?” Eddie asked.
“Well, there’s a missing section in the fence between your yard and the neighbors’. It’s hidden behind the shrubbery and I don’t think it’ll make or break a deal, but it’s a little . . . odd.”
Eddie looked at Hope. “It wasn’t there when I was growing up.”
“I don’t remember it from my childhood, either, but it was there when I arrived this spring,” I said. “The neighbor’s daughters use it to visit Gran.”
That night at dinner, Eddie asked Gran about it.
“Oh, that.” Gran laughed. “It’s so the good-looking man next door could come over and visit without the neighbors seeing.”
“You built that for Matt?” Ralph asked.
“Heavens, no, dear! Although I’m sure it’s come in handy for him and Hope.”
I felt my face turn fifty shades of red. How on earth did Gran know?
“They’ve been dating?” Ralph looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“That explains the candle I found in the potting shed,” Eddie whispered to me. “Or should I call it the love shack?”
“Stop it!” I roughly elbowed him.
“You have me intrigued, Miss Addie,” Ralph said. “Who took out the fence?”
“There was a gentleman who lived there in the seventies, whose wife had Alzheimer’s.” She turned to Eddie. “Do you remember him?”
“Vaguely,” Eddie said. “Glen something, wasn’t it?”
Gran nodded. “Glen Adams.”
I put down my fork and stared at Gran. Eddie and Ralph did the same, then we all exchanged a look. Was she saying what we thought she was saying? “So you and Glen . . .”
“We became very close friends during some hard years. Charlie, of course, was paralyzed, and then he died. And poor Glen’s wife didn’t even know who he was.
He cared for her at home as long as he could—longer than he should have, actually; she roamed the house at all hours and kept running away.
He finally had to put her in the nursing home.
And then he was out there every day for most of the day, even though half the time she thought he was trying to harm her. ”
“Oh, Gran.”
“After she died, he moved to Dallas to be near his daughter. We met up several times a year. He went with me on some of my trips abroad.”
“You loved him?”
“Oh, yes, honey.”
“So why didn’t you marry him?” Eddie asked.
“Oh, we talked about it. But his kids were very sensitive—they hated the idea of their mother being replaced, and he didn’t want them to know that we’d seen each other when she was alive—although I don’t think that you can cheat on someone who has already mentally gone.
Besides, we didn’t consummate our relationship until she’d passed.
It was a line neither one of us wanted to cross. ”
“Well, there’s a lot two people can do besides actual consummation,” Ralph said.
His words echoed Matt’s the night we’d caught the kids digging in the yard. My already warm face grew hotter.
“Hey!” Eddie put his hands over his ears. “This is my mother we’re talking about!”
“Glen should have stood up to his children and the gossips and married you,” I said.
“Oh, I never wanted to marry again.” Gran buttered a roll, as if we were discussing something as mundane as the weather.
“I liked having my own space and being able to come and go as I pleased without having to answer to anyone. Plus I wanted to travel more than he did. For a long while there, though, we gave each other a lot of comfort.”
“So you had another romance in your life,” Ralph said.
“Oh, more than one, dear. You know all those years I traveled?”
We all nodded our heads. Throughout my childhood, Gran had taken lots of exotic trips.
“Well, there a French man who’d meet up with me. He was single, too, and the kind of person who didn’t want to be tied down. Oh, we had the best times! I think one reason it was so wonderful was because we only saw each other often enough to not get sick of each other.”
“I had no idea!” Eddie put his napkin on the table, clearly flummoxed.
“And later, there was a man in New York who had the most delightful sense of humor. We visited Hong Kong and Australia and Tahiti together.” Gran speared a dainty bite of salad. “There were other little flirtations here and there along the way, but those were the main ones.”
“Wow!” said Ralph, clearly impressed.
It took Eddie a moment to close his gaping jaw. “I’m gobsmacked.”
Gran laughed. “Most people don’t really know what goes on in another person’s private life.
” She primly took a sip of iced tea. “Most of us keep secrets because we’re afraid of being judged.
Funny thing is, the person who judges us the most harshly is usually ourselves, so our guilt and regret and shame just fester in the dark. ”
“So the answer is complete disclosure?”
“Oh, no, not necessarily,” Gran said. “The answer is forgiveness. Of others, of course, but most especially of ourselves.”
Eddie put down his fork. “How, exactly, do you do that?”
“Yeah,” Ralph asked, leaning forward.
“It’s taken me ninety-one years to figure it out, but after Hope and Matt found out the truth about that baby, I had to find a way to forgive myself or else die of remorse. I know this will sound strange to you, but Mother gave me the key.”
“Is she still on the ceiling?” Ralph asked, clearly intrigued.
“I honestly don’t know,” Gran said. “I don’t see her, but she talks to me sometimes. And I distinctly heard her say, ‘Pack your burdens in a suitcase and give it to God.’”
Eddie, Ralph, and I looked at each other. Maybe Gran was further gone mentally than we’d realized.
“That’s when it hit me: forgiveness is not so much something you do as something you don’t do.
You stop carrying your guilt and anger and resentment around.
So I pictured it as a big old heavy suitcase I’ve been lugging around everywhere.
I imagined carrying it onto a train and hoisting it into the luggage compartment.
Then I climbed off and watched the train leave the station, going faster and faster and getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared down the track.
And then I walked away, feeling light and free. ”
My throat felt strangely tight. I think Eddie’s did, too, because his eyes were glistening.
“And that worked?” Ralph asked.
“Yes, dear. You might have to picture it a couple of times, but then when an old regret comes up, you just remind yourself, ‘I got rid of that baggage.’”
The doorbell rang. “Oh, that’ll be the Weldon sisters,” Gran said. “They said they’d come over for a visit tonight.”
I helped Gran up and onto her walker while Eddie got the door. And later that night, I dreamed about helping Gran load her steamer trunk onto a train, then watching the train levitate off the track and into the sky, where it soared away like an old warplane.