When I handed my grandson and his bride a handmade gift at their lavish wedding, she held it up and laughed in front of 400 guests. I turned to leave in humiliation, but then someone grabbed my hand so hard I gasped. What happened next shook everyone.
My name’s Margaret, but everyone who matters calls me Maggie. I’m 82, and I thought life had already wrung me dry of surprises. But what happened at my grandson’s wedding proved that even at my age, the heart can still break in the most unexpected ways.
I live alone now in the little house at the end of Lincoln Street. My husband, Walter, built it with his own hands back in 1963, and I can still see him hammering away on summer afternoons, his shirt soaked through with sweat and his smile wide as the sky. He’s been gone almost 20 years, and my son, Richard, passed from cancer a decade later.
So now it’s just me and Ethan, my grandson. He’s all I’ve got left in this world, and he’s enough. Richard’s widow remarried after the funeral and moved down to Florida with her new husband.
Ethan was 16 then, caught between childhood and whatever comes after, and she asked if he could stay with me through high school. I practically begged her to let him. Those were good years.
I made his breakfast every morning, packed his lunch with little notes tucked inside, and watched him grow from a gangly boy into a man who opened doors for strangers and called me just to check in. He got himself through college, became an architect, and stayed humble through all of it. So when he called me last spring with his voice shaking with happiness, I knew something big was coming.
“Grandma, I met someone. I really think she’s the one.”
I cried right there on the phone. Happy tears, the kind that come from deep in your chest where hope lives.
“Tell me about her, sweetheart.”
“Her name’s Veronica. She’s smart and beautiful and… Grandma, she’s so classy. Her family owns half the businesses downtown.
Real estate, jewelry stores, even that golf club with the fancy gates. But she’s different from all that. She’s kind.”
I wanted so badly to believe him.
The first time I met Veronica was at a brunch her mother threw at their country estate. I wore my best dress, the pale blue one with the pearl brooch Walter gave me on our 15th anniversary. When I pulled up to their house, I had to stop myself from gaping.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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