Chapter 20

I look down at my hands lying in my lap, and then I move my eyes over to hers, covered in the many rings on her fingers, drawing my eyes there almost automatically. It's like the many coloured stones want to hypnotize me, drawing my attention away from what I really want to see.

My mom always said I had her hands. And I believed her, but somehow, in some strange way I struggle to recall her hands in front of me. The same hands that played with my hair, and tugged me into bed at nights, and I can't seem to remember them. What I can remember is how she told me that she had her mother's hands. It made me feel connected. After I lost my mom I would stare at my hands, knowing I had something of hers that could never be taken away from me. When I was lying in the hospital after I lost half my face I knew that nothing was forever. Not even having her hands. Her hands were gone. Burned up to ashes. Mine could have been gone if I was fast enough to bring them to my face before the acid hit me. But now... Now I am searching in her hands, in my grandmothers hands, the type of familiarity that I see in my own. The smoothness I do remember in hers.

But I just don't see it. The folds in my fingers, sitting deep on my knuckles doesn't look the same as her skin that seems to have gotten lose over the ears. She doesn't have the short nails on the tips like I do, but rather long fake nails that ruin the form of her hands. The only thing we seem to have in common is the wideness of the hands which doesn't make me feel connected to her at all.

Her rings digging into her fingers, like they haven't been taken off in decades is also different from the lonely ring on my finger that E.J. gave me, the promise that our friendship will last forever. I don't have the opportunity to search her hands for much longer, trying my best to look for something that will tie us together before she speaks.

"You had quite the blow-up there kid," my grandmother says, picking up her hot chocolate from the coffee table and taking a sip before placing it back. "But I guess I deserved that, didn't I?"

"I just want to know what happened between you and my mom, okay?" I answer. If I had to be honest with myself, I wasn't exactly getting the warm feeling I wanted to get from her. Even now that she is nice and understanding, I still feel cold toward her, not wanting to stay longer than what is needed.

"Those are old stories. Really old. But let's just say that I did something that wasn't exactly legal, and your mom fell on some hardship right after. I didn't want to help her, so she blackmailed me for money," she answers and immediately I can see the change in her posture.

"I'd like the truth. Not a watered down story," I answer, looking her in the eyes, wanting her to look at me and understand how much I need all of this. "I think I deserve at least that from you."

She sighs before she sits back on the couch again, leaning against the back of it and closing her eyes.

"You need to understand Brody... It was a different time. Things were done differently, and now... Maybe I would have done things differently now. But I'm not proud of what I did. You need to understand that..."

She opens her eyes again and looks at me before she continues.

"When I am done you might never want to see me again."

"Well, a few minutes ago you would have done anything to not have ever met me at all," I say, feeling the bitterness push up in me.

"You understand wrong Brody. I thought you were here for money," she answers.

"And even if I was? Even if I was here to blackmail you? Would you not have been glad to see your grandson? At least see that he was alive and doing okay?" I ask, sitting forward, looking her in the eyes, wanting every bit of truth she can give me.

"Brody... When you get to my age you get used to losing people. Sometimes it's friends who move away and in best intentions promise to keep contact, and then somehow they don't. Brothers and sisters lose contact with one another. Your loved ones die. At this point you just get used to losing people. Or maybe you just don't want new people coming into your life, because you become scared. You become bitter. You know everything is only temporary. Love. Life. All just temporary. And when you wake up from life and look around you at the relationships you have built, wanting it to last a lifetime, you realize it is suddenly all gone. It feels like a wasted life Brody. Think about it... Why was I put here? To have my parents die? To lose the love of my life? To say goodbye to my only child? And I am here, left alone... An old woman with a heart turning to stone, not wanting to love anymore, because loving means losing," she answers. "So I hope you understand. I would not have gone searching for you, because eventually I will lose you to. Whether it be to a pretty girl and children of your own, or to death... It all just goes by so quickly."

She wipes a few tears away and I can't help but feeling sorry for her.

"Everything is temporary," I say. "Which is why I want the story. Even if I am mad about it now, that anger will also be temporary."

"Well kid, you are in for one hell of a tale," she says with a sigh.

"It's okay. I'm sure I have been through worse," I answer with a slight chuckle that slips out before I can stop it, making her look at me, but she doesn't comment on my little laugh.

"Donna came home one evening with that boy I warned her about. The one with the long hair. He even had a stupid name. Rodney. Can you ever? My Donna, falling for a guy named Rodney..." She sighs again, lifts her cup of hot chocolate and sips on it a few times again.

"What did she tell you about Rodney?" she asks.

"My biological dad? Not that much. She said he died after I was born. She told me it was too painful to talk about," I answer, trying to go through my memories, searching for a memory of him, or something she might have told me, but I come up with nothing. As usual.

"He was a pig. He defiled my precious Donna. But she didn't listen. Into drugs. Into the drink. I sent her off to rehab twice. Every time she came back she was my Donna again, and then he would show up again and she would turn into... into... into this other person," my grandmother says, wiping more tears from her cheeks. "And then she came home one night and she told me she was pregnant... Oh, the heartache that child caused her father that night. We knew it was Rodney who knocked her up. And all the drugs. We were sure that the baby wouldn't be normal. The dad was a washout. Our Donna was high all the time. There was no way that baby could possibly be normal. So I did what I had to do. I locked Donna in the basement, called up an old friend of mine who used to after dark help girls in that position, and had her come over to the house."

"So you were going to have me aborted?" I ask just as she takes a deep breath and another few sips of her drink.

"Would you not have done the same? I was trying to be a good mother. I didn't want my Donna's life to be over," she said, shock on her face as if she could not dare believe that I was judging her for almost killing me before I was even born.

"Just continue," I answer through clenched teeth, trying my best not to lose my temper all over again.

"My friend ended up not coming over. Things went very wrong that night. When I went to the room to check on Donald, your grandfather, he was laying on the bed, a grey colour on his face. He died of a heart attack. And I knew it. Your mother had killed him. She had broken his heart and that is what he died off. She killed her own father by breaking his heart."

My grandmother becomes a little bit hysterical, wiping tears from her face, speaking faster than what she did in the beginning. The rings clicking against one another as she brings her hands up to her face every few seconds to get rid of more tears.

"And things just got worse... The piece of shit that Donald was. Well... I needed to make sure first... And I needed the funeral papers. And there it was... His will. His damn will was there and I took it and read it. And the bastard forgot to change his will. He left everything... everything to his first wife. They were married for six months before she left him for another woman. I had given my whole life to him. Twenty-seven years of marriage and he leaves everything we worked for to a dyke on a motorcycle who jumps from one woman to the next, probably with disgusting diseases living inside her!"

She gets so riled up that she gets up from the couch, her hands in fists, walking to a photo of her with who I guess must be my grandfather. She picks it up, and then without any warning, making me jump, she spits at the glass covering the photo, hitting him right in the face before she puts it down again and takes her seat on the couch again.

"I'm sorry. I probably don't have to explain how little patience I have for the perverted and unnatural nature of some people. Call me old fashioned, but I have seen many things in my life," she says with a little bit of a smile which just makes me want to slap her and tell her that I am in love with a boy who has better morals than what she will ever have even if she lived another hundred years.

Before I could actually answer her she went on, staring out the window and into the snow outside. Her eyes zoning out like she was seeing something else that nobody could see.

"So I put him into the freezer and from there on I forged his signature to change the will. I paid off the mortician to say that he died a year later. No harm done... I did the right thing. I provided for my family... But no! That wasn't enough for your mother. She wanted the car! She wanted the baby! She wanted that piece of shit that knocked her up! I told her never to darken my front door again... But she did... Oh, she did. Years later. After five years I had thought that she had forgotten about me, that she was doing good, or maybe that we would meet up again and reconcile our differences, but she was back. With another man this time. And I thought as such. I had seen Rodney back in town for a couple of years already... Yes, they didn't work out and he was back... But she came back too. She did... With a man named Derrick. So I paid the bitch off when she said she was going to tell the whole town what I did. I gave her the money and I told her if she stepped foot in this state again I would put her in a grave next to her father..."

She sighs as she clicks her rings together and wipes more tears from her cheeks.

"I did the right thing. I know I did... I know I did the right thing," she says quietly before she looks over to me.

"You're a monster," I whisper almost inaudibly. "I should have never come here. I should have kept the story my mom invented about you about how wonderful you were. Sometimes the truth is bloody overrated."