This was the man who had given me the puberty talk complete with visuals and a book. Who had bought me pads and tampons without flinching dozens of times. Who had shaved his own calf to teach me how to shave my legs. This was the same man who had given me a very serious sex talk before blatantly asking if I needed him to take me to get on birth control, even though I’d never said anything that would give him the impression I was interested in boys. This was the same man who had gestured toward my boobs a hundred times while helping me train and growled, “Do something with them!” when they were halfway popping out of my sports bras back before I’d gotten smart and started doubling up on them.
This was the same man who had left a box of condoms on my bed eight weeks after I’d had Mo.
Grandpa Gus and I didn’t do awkward. We never had. So the fact that he was sucking in a breath, making a face that said he was dreading whatever was about to happen…
I already didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.
And I knew somehow that it wasn’t because of the man with me.
And I got that reconfirmation to listen to my gut instinct not even two minutes later.
“Elena,” Grandpa Gus greeted me tensely, making that dread grow even bigger.
This person here wasn’t a friend. She wasn’t someone to be trusted. That’s what that name meant.
I braced myself, trying to rack my brain for whatever the hell this lady could mean. Who was she? “Grandpa,” I said as I stopped beside him, giving him a kiss on the cheek and then going up to my toes to give Peter one too, right as Jonah stood beside me. Really, he shouldn’t be surprised I’d shown up. He’d basically asked for it by being so weird and cryptic. He knew me better than that.
“Peter, Mr. DeMaio,” Jonah said, extending a hand toward Peter first, shaking it, and then doing the same toward my grandpa.
Honest to God, even I was impressed right then that he’d taken the initiative to be the bigger person and try shaking his hand again. I was going to have to think about that later.
Something was off because Grandpa Gus decided this woman was the greater threat because he shook Jonah’s hand after a moment of hesitation, when I damn well knew that if things were normal, he would have just stared at it until things got uncomfortable.
That was how we rolled.
Usually.
I turned my attention to the woman standing there, holding a pale pink leather purse in her hand. A hand that had a huge diamond ring on it. And something weird happened when I took in her face. It looked familiar…. I couldn’t think about when I had possibly seen it before, but it was really, really familiar looking.
“Hello,” the woman said in a careful, lightly accented Texan drawl. A brief smile flashed across a very nice face that had taken the years and rolled with them. She really was beautiful in a fancy kind of way.
I was narrowing my eyes as Grandpa Gus’s hand moved in my peripheral vision as he gestured to the woman. “Elena,” he said again, reminding me that I could go another thirty years before he ever called me by my name again. A name he had passed down to me from his own mom, who I had never met.
I waited, glancing at Jonah who was looking totally calm… because he didn’t know the weird shit Grandpa was saying and doing that was setting off my own inner alarm.
“This is Rafaela,” Grandpa Gus said in a tight, unwelcoming voice.
Was he… uncomfortable?
I didn’t smile or extend my hand. I did frown though and stare at him, trying to pick up more hints.
Grandpa stared, something about his face… apologetic? “This is….”
Since when the hell did this man struggle for words? I glanced at Peter and saw even more how uncomfortable he must have felt right then. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen this man feeling weird. Defensiveness rose up inside of me.
The woman coughed discreetly, looking awkward too. Then she thrust out her hand toward me and said, “I’m your grandmother, Elena.”
I stared at the hand in the circle between us and asked very slowly, my ears starting to ring as I asked, like I had heard wrong, “Who?”