She supposed so. After all, most women of her grandmother’s generation and cultural bent felt it their duty to defer to their husband’s decisions. And together, they’d certainly done all they could to clip a young girl’s wings. No makeup, no dating, no going off by herself… To this day, she wasn’t sure how she managed to talk them into letting her take that job at Granata’s, one of Pittsburgh’s most popular Italian restaurants. Four evenings a week, waiting tables. Which was where she met Vinnie, the youngest of the four Granata brothers, already thirty to her sixteen.
Another twist to the gut, this one sharper. Colder. To be sure, he’d courted her slowly. Sweetly. Secretively. Never touched her, except for the occasional stroke of her cheek, a squeeze of her hand, when no one else was around, and not even that the first year. Blinded by the dazzling glare of first love, Galen had been living a dream, hardly daring to believe that this handsome, older man really wanted her. That he might rescue her from the prison of her grandparents’ over-protectiveness. But he did. Enough to keep their secret for two years. The morning of Galen’s eighteenth birthday, they eloped.
He’d cheated her out of a wedding. Too.
A sharp breeze rattled the windows; with a sharp sigh, Galen turned back to the desk, saw the envelope.
“Because you had a choice.”
Yes, it was true. After all, she could have gotten a job—any job—and tried to make a life of her own. After all, it wasn’t as if there were any children—Galen shut her eyes, waiting out the tug of self-pity.
So. She could have refused her grandmother’s offer to come live with her. Just until she got on her feet, Gran had said. Except that within five minutes of moving back, Galen realized the indomitable woman she’d feared so much as a child had somehow turned into a frail and needy old lady. Still domineering, still set in her ways, to be sure, but now someone Galen could love.
But. Now Gran was gone, and Galen found herself back at square one. All she had, besides this house and a couple of not-exactly-impressive bank accounts, was a neurotic terrier-mix who piddled whenever she got too excited, and whatever was inside this envelope. She couldn’t imagine what it might be: Gran had insisted on putting Galen’s name on everything some time ago, insisting she didn’t want any “rigamarole”, as she put it, with the government, when the time came. Said there’d be little enough as it was, no sense making things complicated on top of it.
The old chair squawked as she sank back onto in it, began untwisting the strings on the suddenly blurred envelope. She knuckled away a tear, supposing when your very last relation dies on you, when, at thirty-five, you find yourself childless and husbandless and careerless and lifeless, it’s hard not to feel a little down in the dumps.
Steam hissed from the radiator squatting underneath the window, startling awake the walking mop. Speaking of personal effects. Eyes bulging, the tiny dog hopped out of her basket and clicked over the bare wooden floor to Galen, whimpering to be picked up. Gran’s dog, Baby, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Yorkie. Maybe. Not an attractive animal. For several seconds, dog and woman stared at each other.
With a weighty sigh, Galen scooped the raggedy thing into her lap, then finally undid the envelope, pulled out the contents. Oh. A life insurance policy, looked like. She scanned the first page. Blinked. Heard her heart begin to pound in her ears.
“Jiminy Christmas,” she said on a long, slow whisper, only to yelp like she’d been goosed, the mutt flying off her lap, when the phone rang again.
Galen managed a strangled “Hello?” as the dog made her stiff-legged way back to her basket, into which she flopped with a little doggy groan.
“Galen, baby? It’s Cora. You know, you’ve been on my mind so much the past couple of weeks, and it’s been way too long since I’ve heard from you, so I finally figured I’d better just go on ahead and call before I drove myself crazy. What’s going on, honey?”
The rich, soothing voice of her mother’s old friend swept over her. Just like that, Galen saw the frown pleating the coffee-brown forehead, remembered long-ago Saturday mornings in Cora Mitchell’s base housing living room in Norfolk, playing dress-up with Cora’s daughters to the comforting hum of their mothers’ conversation a few feet away.
Tears swam in Galen’s eyes, as her throat went dry and tight. She’d been out so seldom during the three years she’d spent with her grandmother, she’d lost touch with what few friends she had. Other than the parish priest and a few neighbors who’d hesitantly inquired about her grandmother, she’d talked to no one this past week. Not that she’d ever exactly been a party girl, but still—
“Oh, Cora!” spilled out on something between a sob and a sigh.
“Galen! What is it? What’s happened, baby?”
So she told the only real friend she had left in the world about her grandmother’s passing, about how things had changed between them, about how much she missed the old bat—this said on one of those crying laughs that happens when your emotions get all tangled up in your head like that wad of gumbands in Gran’s desk—which brought the expected moans of commiseration and sympathy. Galen honked into a stiff, scratchy generic tissue—Gran never would pay extra for the good stuff—then pointed out that Gran had been nearly ninety-one, after all.
“Still,” Cora said, and Galen could feel the hug. “Things had really changed that much? Between you?”
“Amazing, huh?”
“A blessing, is what I’m thinking.”
Barely eight years old, Galen had been staying overnight with Cora while her father, home on leave after six months at sea, whisked Galen’s mother off to New York for a quick second honeymoon. It was Cora, tears tracing silver tracks down dark cheeks, who’d gently told her that her parents had died because some drunk had run head-on into them, just on the other side of Dover, Delaware, on their way back. And, ultimately, it had been Cora and her husband who’d delivered Galen to her never-before-seen grandparents in Pittsburgh. Her father’s parents, they of the stoic, strict Slovak extraction, her mother’s Irish parents having both passed away some time before.
Now, if anyone had bothered to ask Galen her druthers about who she wanted to live with, she would have chosen Cora—who was more than willing—over her grandparents any day. The court, however, ruled in favor of blood over druthers, and that was that. Cora had stayed in touch anyway, even after her husband retired from the military and they moved back to her native Detroit, figuring she was still Galen’s honorary aunt.
Hearing Cora’s voice…well, it was a Godsend, is what it was. Not just because Galen was still getting over her grandmother’s death, but because—it all came back to her, now—there was the little matter of just having discovered she was the sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million dollars.
She burst into tears.
“Oh, hell, honey…Oh, shoot, I wish I was there! Talk to me, baby. Get it out, that’s it, get it all out.”
So, between assorted choked sobs and blubbers, she did.
Cora went understandably, if uncharacteristically, silent for several seconds. Then she said, “And you had no idea?”
“N-none. And I have no idea how she did this, why she did this, where she got the money to make the payments on the policy…” Galen shook her head, pushing that stray wisp behind her ear. “I suppose I’ll never know, now. Thing is, though, I keep thinking I’m reading it wrong.”
“Okay. Tell me what it says. Word for word.”
She did.
“You’re not reading it wrong,” came the dry pronouncement across the wire. “So can I hit you up for a loan? This house I bought’s about to bleed me dry.”
Good old Cora.
“So…what’re you going to do with all that money?”
Galen blew out a sigh, stared again at the policy.