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Chapter 13

I had already cleared my outfit with her and everything I was wearing had come from Juliet, anyway, but Brenna still gave me a careful once-over as I walked into the gallery. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what I had on but she raised one eyebrow as she studied me.

“What?” I asked her in place of a greeting.

“Have you lost weight?”

“Maybe,” I said. I thought that I must have because Juliet’s pants were all fitting without much of a fight with the waistband, but I hadn’t been able to confirm that. My scale had gone underwater and hadn’t been functioning when I’d finally been able to get back into my apartment to retrieve it. But losing weight made sense, because I’d been working out more often. I felt great and was dreading it a lot less, especially when Granger and I went together. He’d never even noticed how I might have gotten a little flushed when I tried to do sit-ups or toward the end of our runs. He also hadn’t noticed me ogling him in his shorts and the fitted shirts he wore to ward off the cold, the ones that also showed every single angle of all his interesting angles.

I turned to him now and he nodded back. He had been checking the room, eyes moving side to side without his head swiveling. It was a habit that I assumed related to his earlier job, the one that he didn’t discuss, the one where he’d used all the different languages and was always out of the country and also involved knife throwing.

Anyway, there was no need to fling sharp instruments so far at this art show, and he wasn’t dressed for fighting tonight. I wasn’t sure where exactly he was able to buy suits in that size but what he had on fit him like a glove and looked amazing. I’d stepped up my makeup and had created soft waves of non-orange hair, and I didn’t think that I looked too bad either.

We were dressy because this event was a big deal for Brenna. She’d brought in one of the artists being featured, although hers was kind of the undercard. The main draw was an established painter who now got national attention and showed at a big gallery in New York. She lived here, though, and also liked to support the people who’d first given her a chance.

“How would you say her name?” I asked my sister as we looked at a placard with information about the people whose works were on display tonight. I tried to sound it out. “Scissors…”

“I just call her Ione,” Brenna answered haughtily. “We’re on a first-name basis.”

“I would pronounce it ‘Szczupakiewicz-Hughes,’” Granger told me without hesitation, the words rolling off his tongue. “The first part of her last name is Polish. I wonder if she speaks it.”

“How could you know how to say that so well? Do you speak Polish?” I questioned suspiciously.

“Some,” he admitted. “Enough to get by.”

“Why were you getting by in Poland?”

“You know,” he said. “Want a glass of champagne?”

“It’s not champagne. We’re drinking cava tonight and it’s yummy. The hors d’oeuvres are too—oh, there’s Dion. He’s late, again.” My sister darted off, and I saw that they did have a better spread here than when Mr. Campbell entertained, in that we were not limited to warm-ish coffee and thin, dry sandwiches. I picked up a bottle of sparkling wine but Granger took it from my hands and expertly poured two glasses for us.

“ Saúde ,” he told me, and that word I knew: it was the way to say cheers in Portuguese, not Polish. We clinked glasses and sipped. “Tiago and I were discussing booze the other day,” he told me. “He taught me what he claims is a famous saying in Brazil. Quem bebe sem brindar, sete anos …” He looked at me and then shook his head. “Never mind.”

“I understood some of that. You said, ‘who,’ and ‘without,’ and ‘seven years.’ How does it end?” I was asking, but then my big sister and her husband walked into the gallery and she came right over.

“Addie!” Nicola exclaimed, and hugged me hard. Nicola wasn’t one for exclaiming or hugging, although I had noticed that she didn’t mind a lot of physical contact with her husband. She was smiling, too, which was also pretty new behavior for her. For most of our childhood, she’d looked stressed and harassed (which she had been, by all of us kids) and then for the past few years, she’d seemed exhausted. Now, she just looked happy.

“Jude, this is Granger. My roommate,” I explained, and he shook hands with Nicola’s husband. He then took two more glasses, but my sister said no.

“We’re not drinking,” she said, and I knew that her husband didn’t ever drink but then, something about the look on her face…

“Holy Mary!” I burst out. “Nicola Curran! Are you—”

“It’s Nicola Bowers,” she reminded me, but she was smiling even bigger and I started to cry as I hugged her this time. “It’s very early and we’re not telling anyone yet,” she whispered, and I nodded. “That means you have to get control of yourself so no one will know.”

“Ok, I am,” I promised as I released her. I hugged her husband, too, and he also looked over the moon. “I’m so, so happy for you both.”

“Thanks, Addie. You’re going to be an amazing aunt,” Nicola said. “Oh, there’s Mom. I better go.” She held up her finger before melting into the crowd and I knew what she meant: don’t say a word, especially not to her.

“Your mother’s going to see it in your face,” Granger warned. “Come on.” He put his palm on my shoulder and directed me toward the back of the gallery, where he looked down and studied me carefully.

“Can you tell that I was crying?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered immediately. “You got r—you flushed a little, and your eyes still look glassy. I’ll stand in front of you.” He moved to face me and gave his back to the rest of the room, and he also crossed his arms so that he was even wider.

“I can’t believe that my sister is having a baby,” I breathed.

“It’s great,” he answered, but he didn’t sound so excited. Of course, why would he have been? He wasn’t the one becoming an aunt! “Addie, you’re crying again.”

“Sorry, sorry.” I looked up at the ceiling, wiped under my eyes, and took deep breaths. “I know this can’t be as mind-blowing for you because you don’t even want kids, but Nicola having a baby is just…it’s just…”

He stopped a passing waiter and asked for a few cocktail napkins, which he gave to me.

“Thank you.” They worked better than my fingers. “I think I’m not going to be able to stop crying.”

“We can just stand here for a while,” he answered.

With him in front of me providing coverage, it really was like being in a duck blind. I was totally incognito. “I never understood all the advantages of being so big,” I admitted. “I already knew that you can carry a lot and you never have to use ladders, but I never thought of using you as a human shield.”

“I’m a bigger target,” he pointed out. “That’s a disadvantage.”

“Wait, a target for what?”

“Anything.” He took my teary napkin and shot it a few feet into a garbage can. “You said that you like kids, but I didn’t understand how much that’s true.”

“I really do, and I don’t want to give that up.” I knew that the words were true; I couldn’t live the life that Mina had.

“Who would ask you to give it up?” he questioned, and the answer was no one. There was no one.

“I just mean, if I ever meet someone new,” I explained, “he’ll have to want the same things that I do.”

“Someone like Skurwysyn.”

“No, nothing like him.”

“But he was the guy you wanted to marry,” Granger pointed out. “Let me see.” He put his finger under my chin and tilted up my jaw so that we were looking at each other. “No, you still look like you were crying. Could you deflect and tell people that you got bad news instead?”

“I…hold on, I better get this.” My phone had been ringing in my purse and I’d been ignoring it, but maybe one of my other sisters had also discovered the big news and wanted to discuss.

Before I answered, I saw that the call was coming from Mina and strangely, she was crying, too. “Addie?” her voice warbled out. “Something has happened.”

It was the second time I’d gotten one of these calls in the past few months, but on this occasion, it should have made more sense. It should have been easier to hear and accept. Neither of those things was true, though, and I felt tears start as I listened to her explain a little.

“Mina, I’ll be right there,” I told her. “I’ll come right now. We’ll get through this.” I hung up and looked at Granger. “We have to go,” I told him.

The gallery had gotten a lot more crowded but he made a path and to the exit and I followed it. I watched him take more napkins from the drink table that we passed.

“Mr. Campbell?” he asked me when we were out on the street. A freezing wind gusted and blew my hair straight up around my face before I could answer.

“He’s gone,” I answered, and we hurried down the sidewalk. “She’s a mess. As much as she called him names and made fun of him, she worked for him for almost forty years.”

“That’s dedication, especially since she didn’t like him. You did, though.” He closed my door and got into the driver’s side of his Jeep.

“I did like him,” I agreed, and took some of the napkins. “What an up and down night! First, Nicola’s wonderful news, and now this. I expected it.” I paused. “No, I really didn’t. Doesn’t that sound dumb? He was over a hundred years old, and I’ve been looking for a different job, and I even talked with him about what I was going to do when he was gone. And it still feels so shocking.”

“It always does.” He reached across the seat and patted my hand in a soothing rhythm.

“The other times when I’ve cried in front of you, you told me to stop.”

“And that didn’t work,” Granger remembered. “I don’t like to see you upset but telling you to cut it out isn’t a good move.”

“You also suggested getting dessert a few times.”

“Yeah. That’s just something from when I was a kid.”

“What?” I asked, but he didn’t speak for a while.

Then he started out by saying something that I didn’t understand. “We had a big freezer at my parents’ restaurant. It was a walk-in, and I was in charge of cleaning it.”

“I see,” I said encouragingly, although I didn’t.

But he explained more. “When I wanted to hide, I’d go in there.”

“Why did you have to hide?”

“I didn’t always get along with my parents. Especially my father, because he’s just a dick. We never saw eye to eye about anything and he and my mom fought all the time. My sister ignored it but I never could, so when he turned on me or when I was upset, I’d go into the freezer. There was a ton of shit on the shelves that had been frozen and stuck there for years and I had a box of popsicles stashed away in the back. They were the cheap kind that mostly tasted like colored water, and I’d eat one or two.”

“To feel better, you’d eat a frozen popsicle in a freezer? That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” I told him. I could imagine a big blonde kid slumped over in the cold, hiding from a guy who was mean to him.

“It was a chance to get away. I spent so much of my life in that restaurant and there was nowhere else to hide. I sometimes envied the cat that got to live outside, because even when it was snowy or rainy, at least he got to have his freedom. I was always trapped in that place.”

I thought about him being stuck in Amunì, six days a week for so many hours. Again.

“So I’m not going to offer you a popsicle, but I’ll help you if I can,” he continued. “I remember being a dick myself after Skurwysyn got—after what happened to him.”

“It was a hard time,” I said, and then we rode for a few more miles on Mack Avenue in silence while I thought about these deaths. “I hope it didn’t hurt Mr. Campbell.”

“It was probably quick. It’s late and he might have been asleep,” Granger said, and then he did something very surprising. He patted my knee but he left his hand there, comforting and warm, all the way to Grosse Pointe.

Although it was cold tonight and the sun had gone down a while ago, Mina stood on the porch outside the big house. When we pulled up in front, I jumped out of the car and when I reached her, she started weeping on my shoulder.

“He was fine!” she sobbed. “One minute, he was fine and the next, he closed his eyes and then…”

“When did it happen?”

“After dinner,” she said, which meant around five-thirty. He had always eaten early.

I looked toward window where he liked to watch the driveway from his study. “That was his favorite place to be, in his chair.”

“No, he was in bed,” she said, and sniffled. “He put his head down on the pillow and that was it. I started screaming but there was no one here to help me.”

“Where was the night nurse?”

“She’s off.” She sniffled again. “I tried to wake him and then I tried to do CPR. Oh, Addie! Why did it have to happen? How could he have left me?”

“Left you?” I questioned, confused.

“I—” She pulled back and looked at me.

“Let’s go inside,” Granger advised, and she stared up at him. I introduced them briefly, and he nodded hello. “Let’s go,” he repeated. He never spoke very loud, but he always had a lot of authority in his words and she listened to him just as his employees did at the restaurant. We all went in and she shut the front door behind us.

“Did you call the family yet?” I asked, looking around. Their cars hadn’t been stationed in the front, and obviously, they wouldn’t have parked in the back.

She shook her head in answer. “He had a list prepared of all the steps I have to follow. I’m not supposed to call them but the lawyers will tomorrow, and they’re not allowed to enter. Security guards will wait by the exterior doors and someone is going to be stationed inside the house, too.”

“To keep his relatives out?” Granger asked, and she nodded. “Are they that bad?”

“They’ll take anything that isn’t nailed down,” she said, which resulted in a new batch of tears.

“Oh, Mina. Here.” I handed her some paper napkins from the gallery and glanced toward the bedroom. “Is he still…”

“They already took him away,” she said, and walked back toward the kitchen, now crying into a napkin.

She went to wash her face while I made tea, and they sat at the table. Granger seemed impressed by the chairs, which were a lot more comfortable than his, but sitting on a cinderblock would also have been better. He had been looking around as we went through the rooms, taking everything in. This kitchen, which Mr. Campbell had probably never entered himself, was larger than my entire studio apartment, and there were about forty other rooms to admire, too.

“Thank you,” Mina said as I poured out three mugs for us. “This whole night doesn’t feel real even though I knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming,” she told me, and I nodded. “But he was feeling fine! He was energetic.”

“Really?” I asked doubtfully.

“In his way,” she explained. “We had dinner together and he told me that he wanted to talk about our future. It was an auspicious night for it.”

We had been looking at our transit predictions earlier but even after I thought back through what she’d determined about her chart, I still didn’t understand what she meant. “Your future? Yours and Mr. Campbell’s, together?” I asked. She glanced over at Granger instead of answering, though, and a silence stretched in the kitchen.

“I’m going to look at the back yard,” he announced and stood. “Addie’s always saying that the grounds are beautiful. I need to call the restaurant, too, so I’ll be gone for a long time.”

The grounds were very beautiful, but they were going to be hard to see at night and with almost everything bare of leaves, it really wasn’t the best time for viewing them. I appreciated him giving us space, though, because as soon as he did…

Hours later we were in the car on the way back to Granger’s house. But although my body was there, my mind had flown away like a vulture into the Michigan summer. How? Why? What?

“Addie?”

I realized that he was speaking and maybe had said my name a few times. “Sorry,” I said. “Can you repeat that?”

“I asked if you were ok.”

Was I? I tried to figure out a response, and then I nodded. I was ok, but I was also in shock. The night had also flown past as I’d sat and listened to Mina at Mr. Campbell’s kitchen table and sometime while she was still speaking, the sun had come up. Now Granger looked tired in its weak light. He was disheveled, stubbly, and extremely handsome, too. He’d stayed the whole time but I wasn’t sure where he’d gone—he couldn’t have been outside for so long, because Mina and I had talked for hours. At least, she had talked and I had listened with my mouth hanging open enough that at one point, I’d had to get a glass of water because my lips had stuck to my teeth.

Still, I hadn’t even realized how long we’d been there until she’d said, “I need to wash my face and change before I go to the lawyer’s office,” and I’d seen that it was morning.

“What are you thinking about right now?” he asked.

“I just can’t believe what she said,” I answered. I had blurted out what she’d revealed to me when we’d gotten into the car, but he’d dealt with it much better than I had. He’d nodded, like it wasn’t such a big deal? But, holy Mary, it was! “I think I’m in shock,” I admitted.

“You worked there for six years,” he said. “You really had no idea that Mina and Mr. Campbell were having an affair?”

“No!” I almost yelled. “No, I had no idea! I never saw any clue at all that they were doing anything like that. She called him names and made fun of him and she never blinked when I complained that he was a jerk or when any of the other employees did, either. The head gardener called him Evil Skeletor and Mina only nodded when she heard it—not like she hated him, but not like she loved him, either. They never did anything that gave me a clue, nothing remotely romantic or sexy.”

He nodded. “Then everything was going on at night after you left.”

“There’s only one person who worked after-hours, a former nurse,” I said. “She and Mina always seemed to get along and if that woman was aware, she never breathed a word about anything. Never. But you’re right, she must have been in on it. Because I think Mina and Mr. Campbell were together for just about forever!”

“Why?”

I shook my head as I tried to piece the details into a narrative that made sense. Between her sobs and my absolute astonishment, the story had been hard to take in. “Before, she told me that she met a man when she was young and gave up everything to be with him. She had wanted to go to New York, she had wanted a family. She’d thought that he might change or that she’d be able to adapt in order to be happy with him. But neither of those things were true.”

“You can’t force someone to be different,” he noted. “It will never work.”

“When she told me the story, I didn’t understand that she meant Mr. Campbell,” I continued. “Of course, it makes sense when I think about it now. She started working for him when she was nineteen and she’s turning sixty. Her birthday is coming up because she’s a Capricorn, like I am.” I thought. “He was already an old man back then. Holy Mary, his wife was alive when she started working at the house! Was Mina was having an affair with Mr. Campbell when he was married? Ugh! It’s all so awful.”

Granger only shook his head.

“She talked to me about her mistakes like they were in the past,” I continued. “But she must have still been with him when she explained it all to me. You know, she was with him.”

“I understand what you mean.”

“So she was with him tonight, maybe not with him but with him in the house, and he died. That mean old man!” I burst out. “His poor wife! Mina was so young when she came to work for him! What was he thinking?”

“He was thinking that he’d have everything that he wanted. Sounds like he did for all these years,” Granger said. “Don’t get pissed at me for pointing out the truth.”

“Do I look angry?” I asked, and he nodded. It was true that I could feel a minimal heat in my face. “I’m not mad at you. It’s a terrible situation, though! Because she lives in a little house with plumbing issues and he lived in that mansion. He had a chauffeur and she drives a car that’s fifteen years old and needs an engine remount.”

“Probably a rebuild.”

“That’s it,” I agreed. “It’s so unfair and inequitable! It’s gross and mean! It’s just—it’s just—”

“It’s shitty.”

“Yes! Yes, it is. She should have walked away from him years ago.” I thought again. “Except, when she was telling me the story about the anonymous man that she’d sacrificed so much for, it sounded like she still had feelings. Like, she still loved the guy even though she knew that it wasn’t a good thing and that she’d wasted her time with him.”

“She had invested decades of her life,” he said. “It must have been hard to give up. He was her boss so her paycheck depended on him, too.”

“It’s all-around terrible, and now the Campbell relatives who have been sucking up to him for years are going to swoop in—”

“Not if there are security guards around,” he interrupted. “Not if his attorney is already involved. Maybe he left something for Mina.”

“Oh, I hope so,” I said fervently. “I hope when she goes to the meeting at the law office tomorrow—today,” I corrected myself, because it was definitely morning, “I hope that she gets good news because as of now, she’s out of a job.”

“What are you going to do? You’re also out.”

“I have savings. I’ve always been very careful, but I’ll get another job to tide me over until I figure out my next career.”

“I think it should be something with plants. With doing landscape design.”

“I don’t have any training or experience besides your yard and messing around with things where Mr. Campbell couldn’t see them,” I reminded him.

“So, go back to school.”

“I don’t have that much saved.” I sighed, and that turned into a big yawn. “I’m so tired. Are you going to be exhausted at the restaurant?”

“Maybe I won’t go in.”

“But you didn’t last night either because we went to the gallery opening.” I stopped myself. “Sorry, I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I just don’t want your stuff to get messed up because of this nuttiness.”

“It won’t. I was happy to go to that gallery thing, and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t at Amunì.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I got a few hours of sleep, too. The couch in the library room isn’t too bad, just a little low, and I’ve survived on a lot less rest than this.”

“I was so glad you were there. I didn’t know exactly where you were in the house, but I knew you wouldn’t leave. When my brain was going to set on fire as Mina talked about Mr. Campbell’s favorite positions in bed, I kept remembering that pretty soon we’d drive home together.”

“She told you how they liked to have sex? What did that have to do with anything?”

“She overshared a lot. I heard way, way too much.” I rubbed my ears. “I felt so sorry for her that I didn’t try to stop her, though, because she was crying so hard. Maybe I think their relationship was weird—”

“Also, exploitative and adulterous,” he added.

“And unhealthy, and unfair,” I agreed. “All those things are true, but what came out last night was how much she loves him. She really, really loves him, no matter what a jerk he was to her.”

“That happens.”

I looked over, but decided the change in his tone was because he was tired. So was I, and I yawned again. Then, for the first time in hours, I checked my phone.

“Mr. Campbell’s lawyer called me,” I said after I listened to my messages. There were three, and they all asked me to come into their office for a meeting this morning. They helpfully supplied the address, as if I hadn’t been there one million times with Mr. Campbell himself.

“Maybe he left something for you, too.”

“It’s probably because they don’t want Mina to be a mess on the floor of their conference room,” I countered, but it was strange. In all the times I’d visited that office, no one had seemed to notice that I was actually a person. My existence had been acknowledged as “servant to Mr. Campbell” and that had been it—I had no idea where they’d even gotten my phone number.

“Do you want me to come?”

“No,” I answered, “but thank you for offering. No, I’m fine.”

“You’re yawning enough to crack your jaw and you’ve been crying on and off,” he pointed out.

Those things were true.

“Maybe I’ll drive you,” Granger suggested. “I can work from their lobby.”

“It’s very nice. They have good WiFi,” I said. “But you don’t have to.”

“No, I don’t have to,” he agreed. But then he added, “Last night when you were glad that I was there, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he told me. “I was glad that I was there, if you needed me.”

“I did.”

He nodded and did the patting thing that he’d done on the way to the Campbell mansion the night before, the series of taps. He also left his hand on my leg in the same way, but this time I rested mine on top of it. Then I closed my eyes and rested them, too, all the way back home.

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