meet him until right after my mother’s murder. He didn’t ever want me, and frankly, I didn’t want him. I don’t hold it against him, because he was never my father.”
Fluke lifted his head at that, cocking it to one side, and when I glanced up at Gideon, his head was at the same angle. Even given the seriousness of the subject, I wanted to laugh at the two of them.
“My mother got married before I was born. His name was—is—Alan. He raised me as his own. Took me to parks, entered me in an awful little league, helped me carry a Mother’s Day tray into Mom’s bedroom every year, took me to my first day of kindergarten. Alan was my father.”
I flexed my fingers, silvery scars standing out against my skin, the tendons twinging as they always did when the weather turned cold for the year.
When I glanced up again, my father was standing there next to the shelves in front of the office, watching and listening. That was the last audience I wanted for this, but at the same time, it wasn’t as though he didn’t already know it all.
“I didn’t know at the time that they were unhappy, but I can see in retrospect that Alan was abusive. Controlling of both of us; always demanding to know exactly where we were at every moment. One night I woke up to screaming in the kitchen. I rushed out to see what was happening. I”—gods, I’d been such a damned potato. I hadn’t considered Alan as a threat, even with my mother lying there bleeding on the kitchen floor, and no sign of an intruder.
Just Alan with a bloody kitchen knife.
She hadn’t been able to speak—too weak and injured—had merely tried to push me in the direction of the door. When I had looked up at Alan, he’d been standing next to the kitchen table, knife still in his hands, looking sad, but not doing anything.
I remembered screaming at him to do something, and after that it all came in flashes. The kitchen chair hitting the wall, Alan looking surprised, then angry, then determined. Mom’s favorite carnival glass vase, a bulbous green iridescent thing, smashed against the cabinet. Wielding a fat shard of green glass like a weapon in front of me as it cut into the very hand that held it. Threatening to kill the only father I’d ever known if he came any closer to us.
The police arriving.
Too late.
“Alan killed my mother. With a kitchen knife. I tried to hold him off, but she bled out before the EMTs arrived.” My voice was a flat monotone, because it had to be. I had to give him the facts, the evidence that pointed toward the answers we needed. If I stopped and thought about it, thought about my mother and that night and the blood . . . I just couldn’t.
“Oh . . .” came the tiny, distressed voice from the door of the shop.
Had the bell jingled?
I jumped up, unseating Fluke, who hopped to the floor, unruffled. He glanced at me, then my grandmother standing in the door to the shop, and assessed the situation expertly, making a beeline to her side. He practically wrapped himself around one of her slim legs, his head laying along her thigh and the tip of his nose reaching all the way past her waist.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—” I started, at the same time as she spoke.
“Oh dear, I had no idea you had company.” She glanced briefly at my father, but then focused on Gideon, even as she reached down to pet Fluke.
My grandmother could see ghosts.
At least she didn’t think I was sitting on the couch telling a fox about my mother’s murder. Smart as Fluke was, that would have been a strange thing to do.
Apparently we were ignoring the story she’d walked in on. That was just as well. “Iris, this is Gideon. Gideon, my grandmother, Iris McKinley.”
He inclined his head and tipped the hat that suddenly sat atop it. “Ma’am.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Gideon.” She looked at him for a long time, then back to me and said, matter-of-factly, “It’s the convergence, then.”
And we’d been worried she might lie. Apparently she was as good at that as Gideon. He flashed her that wide, bright grin. “It does tend to get its way.”
She looked him over, head to toe, and she reached up with her free hand to toy with the locket she wore, biting her