With All My Heart - Emilia Finn Page 0,18

says all the good stuff, anyway.”

“Uncle Jack is a troublemaker…” When the girls’ faces drop – because of course, Uncle Jack is their favorite – I smile. “And his shenanigans keep all the trouble off me. Your dads are so naïve, girls. I swear, they see angels.”

Snickering, Evie sits back against the couch in the living room of my big fancy house. The big fancy house that Bryan never got to buy for me.

We lived comfortably. We were happy. And he was right, ten years later, twenty years later, he was still singeing my hair with passion. But it wasn’t until our boys were grown men that I moved into the home I’m in now.

“So we know you married him, Gramma, since we’re all here today. What happened?”

“I went home that night, I pretended everything was normal, though of course, it wasn’t.”

“You had unprotected sex, Grandma. Didn’t you get pregnant?”

I smile indulgently at my daughter-in-law’s clone. “I didn’t. I could have, it’s a risk I ran, so don’t be like me. Don’t be dumb. Safe sex and all that.” The girls blush at my words. “But I was lucky. I didn’t get pregnant that night. I didn’t get pregnant until your Uncle Bobby; Robert-with no middle name-Kincaid, and that was four years later. Bryan and I had already been married for more than three and a half years by that point.”

“More than three and a half years…” Bean’s dark eyes narrow. “So you married that same year.” She turns and snatches up an aqua blue couch cushion and tosses it at my face. “Finish your damn story, Grandma!”

I laugh and toss the pillow back. I never had daughters. Just like Bryan ordered, I gave him strong sons. Three of them. But those boys married wonderful girls, and those girls gave them plenty of each kind.

I have eleven grandchildren, now. Eight of them carry Bryan’s last name.

We made his name worth something again.

“He dropped me home that night with a promise to meet up the morning of my birthday. We’d have an eight-hour head start on my daddy.”

“You ran away?”

I think back to that warm morning, to the exhilaration of knowing our plans, to the excitement of a future that lay out ahead of us.

“We did. We ran away. I waited for my daddy to go to work that morning, even knowing there was a birthday dinner planned for me for seven that evening at the Tosky’s house. I waited for his truck to pull out. I packed what I wanted. Bryan’s Mustang was parked six blocks away at a public phonebooth, and that morning, I simply went for a walk. I never went home again.”

The girls stare at me in awe.

“Now, I trust you both not to be so impulsive. I trust you not to get any hairbrained ideas like that.”

Evie scoffs. “Yeah, right. You got out because your father was a piece of shit. No way would Daddy just stay here if I decided to ditch town. Not to mention, most of the time, I actually like being in this family. When Daddy’s not being such a caveman.”

I think of my sweet middle son. My serious, silent, brooding Aiden. “No, baby girl. He wouldn’t stand by. And if Ben even so much as thought about it, his brains would be smeared on the bricks.”

She snatches up a second cushion and pegs it at my face. “I’m not with Ben! He’s an asshole.”

I stare into her blue eyes and simply nod. “Alright.”

“Stop saying alright like that. You think you’re so smart.”

I laugh and pass the cushion back just in case she gets pissed a third time. “I know boys like Ben. I know that if he drove up – or rode up – in a Mustang and asked you to hop in, he’s askin’ for a reason. I know he wouldn’t throw those suggestions around lightly.”

Bean rolls her eyes. “Can we stop talking about Ben and go back to Bryan?”

“That’s Poppy to you, sweetheart.” I smile nostalgically and remember him standing against his car in the morning sun. “He waited for me at the phonebooth. He had a bouquet of stolen daisies in his hands… the dirt was still clumped at the bottom. He took my backpack, put it in the back of the car.”

Evie sits on the very edge of her seat. “And then?”

“And then he took me in his arms, dipped me back, kissed the hell out of me, and pulled a twenty-dollar engagement ring from his pocket