Twice in a Blue Moon - Christina Lauren Page 0,102

this. “Well, she needs to retire anyway.” Mom nudges me off the bed. “She came down here to see you, so go talk to her. And go eat something,” she calls after me. “Life goes on.”

Charlie is sitting on my kitchen counter, eating a piece of the blackberry pie Nana brought down from Guerneville. Other than the iPhone near Charlie’s hip, it is an image so immediately familiar it’s almost easy to forget that we’re thirty-two and not sixteen.

I look out the window with a view of the long, immaculate driveway. The entrance is blocked by a fifteen-foot-tall iron gate, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, but I can still see a few photographers pacing just on the other side. I count four of them. One looks like he’s eating an apple. Another is telling a story, gesticulating wildly. They’re chatting so casually; they’re more like coworkers hanging out in a break room than paparazzi stalking me.

“They still out there?” Nana asks from the kitchen table. I glance over just as she straightens the already-neat rows of playing cards in front of her.

“They’ll hover for days.” Charlie groans around a bite of pie.

I shake my head, wanting to refute this, but my words come out thin and reedy. “I bet they’ll get bored and leave soon.”

Nana peers at me over the tops of thick glasses as if to say, Do you think I was born yesterday?

Sensing the tension, Charlie hops off the counter. “I’m gonna shower.” She plugs in her phone, flipping it facedown. It occurs to me she’s been glaring at it off and on. Whatever she’s seeing, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. “Let me know if something happens,” she says on her way out.

Reaching for the kettle, I fill it with water and turn on the stove. “Nana, do you want some tea?”

“I’ll have tea if you’ll stay away from that window and come sit down.”

I take the seat next to her.

“Where’s your mom?” she asks.

“She was doing laundry,” I say. “Most of it’s already washed, but you know how she is.”

Nana scoops the cards together and shuffles them between her hands. These are the hands that taught me how to make pies, that put on Band-Aids after I fell, and helped me learn to tie my shoes. They look so different now than they did then. Her hands used to be smooth, strong, and capable. Now her joints are swollen with arthritis, her skin marked by age.

“She does like her laundry,” Nana says, “but mostly I think she likes to keep busy.”

I grin at her. “Sounds like someone else I know.”

She laughs as she continues to shuffle the cards. “I don’t know. I’ve learned to enjoy the quiet times. Definitely not up making pies at four in the morning like I used to be.”

I’m grateful that Nana and Mom have an apprentice of sorts—a younger woman named Kathy and her cousin Sissy—taking over much of the responsibility of the café. But mention of the nana I grew up with knocks the words loose inside me. “I’m sorry about all this,” I say. “About what’s happening outside . . . and before.”

She splits the deck in half, gives me one stack, and then turns over her first card. Nana motions for me to do the same. I laugh when it registers that, for all of her card expertise, she’s set us up to play the simplest game ever: War.

“You think I can’t handle cribbage or gin, Nana?”

“I think you should give that brain of yours a little break.”

I can’t exactly argue with that.

When I reveal a four, she slides it with her seven into her pile and flips her next card. “I haven’t talked about your grandpa in a while,” she says. “Do you remember anything I’ve told you about him?”

The air in the room seems to go still. Nana and I have always communicated primarily about practicalities: What needs to be done before the breakfast rush. How I need to use colder water for the pie crust. When is it a good time to come down for the holidays. When are my breaks this year.

We don’t talk about her past, her feelings, and certainly not about her husband, who died decades ago. In fact, he died before I was even born. It wasn’t until Grandpa passed away that Nana decided to open the café, had the freedom to do it.

“I know he was in the army and fought in the war,” I say. “