Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Grandma Knows

"Do you want me to make a call?" Bennet asked, the second the Range Rover was gone.

We were standing on the porch with sixty people's casseroles stacked by the door.

"And stop the inspection?"

"I can have it closed in five minutes."

"No." I wrapped my arms around myself. "If you close it, Spence tells everyone I had something to hide. Let them come. My scopes hold zero."

"I know they do. I tested them."

I turned and looked at him.

"You personally tested my scopes."

"In October. Twelve hundred rounds." He almost smiled. "They're very good scopes, Alana."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I kissed him on the porch in front of the last few cars pulling out.

Somebody honked.

By noon Deena's car was gone from the drive.

Celine had come for her in a red Jeep I'd paid half of, and neither of them said goodbye.

My grandmother stood at the window and watched them go.

Then she turned around and clapped her hands once.

"Well," she said. "We have a ham and nobody to impress. Peel the potatoes."

It was the best Christmas dinner of my life.

Three of us at the end of the big table in the kitchen, with the radio playing carols and the windows steamed up.

Bennet peeled potatoes.

My grandmother made him redo six of them.

He did it without complaining, and she watched him with her lips pressed together, trying not to laugh.

We ate ham and potatoes and three different neighbors' green bean casseroles.

Then my grandmother put down her fork.

"Bennet," she said. "What do you do?"

He looked at me.

I shrugged.

"She's going to find out anyway," I said. "She always does."

He wiped his mouth with his napkin and set it down neatly beside his plate.

"I own Ironvale, Carolyn," he said.

My grandmother looked at him for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

Then she started to laugh.

She laughed until she had to hold the edge of the table.

She laughed until tears ran down her face and she had to take her glasses off and wipe them on her cardigan.

"Spence," she gasped. "Spence told you..."

"Three thousand a month," Bennet said.

"And Deena gave you the folding chair."

"It was a sturdy chair."

My grandmother laughed so hard she started coughing, and I had to bring her water.

When she finally caught her breath, she reached across the table and put her hand on top of his.

"Are you going to tell them?"

"When Alana says so."

My grandmother looked at me.

"Not yet," I said. "I want Deena to find out the way she treated him. In public."

My grandmother nodded slowly.

"Your father would have liked that," she said. "He never could stand her either."

"Grandma."

"What? She's my daughter. I'm allowed to say it." She squeezed Bennet's hand. "I'll keep your secret, young man. I've kept bigger ones."

"Bigger than this?"

She just smiled and stood up to get the pie.

After pie I finally opened the newspaper package from my purse.

It was the Pine Hollow paper from the morning I was born.

My father's name was in a little box on page four, under Births.

Under it, in my grandmother's handwriting, she'd written in pencil: "Seven pounds. Loud."

I sat there at the kitchen table and cried, and Bennet put his hand on the back of my neck and didn't say a word.

My grandmother went to bed at nine.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at us.

"I'm taking out my hearing aids," she said. "Just so you both know."

Then she went up.

Bennet looked at me across the kitchen.

I put down the dish towel.

I pulled him up the stairs by the hand.

The old floor creaked under our feet.

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