Then Lucy asked:
“Grandma Margaret?”
“Yes?”
“Can you tell us about Grandpa when he was young?”
I looked at her.
Then at Julian.
He was listening intently.
I realized something.
Julian knew Thomas as an older man.
A successful businessman.
A generous but sometimes distant father figure.
He hadn't known the young man who lived in a rented apartment and couldn't afford proper curtains.
He hadn't known Thomas burning toast.
Or dancing in the kitchen.
Or selling household goods from a little shop with a leaky roof.
I smiled.
“Would you like to hear about the time he accidentally ordered six hundred toilet brushes instead of sixty?”
Lucy burst out laughing.
Julian leaned forward.
“Absolutely.”
So I told them.
I told them everything.
Not the secrets.
Not the money.
The man.
The ridiculous things.
The loving things.
The mistakes he made when he was young.
The small kindnesses nobody ever wrote about.
