Page 33 of Love Bites

“You look quite wrinkled with worry.” She sipped her drink delicately, nodded to Edgar, and then fished out a lime wedge with manicured nails. She nibbled on the lime as if it were a sweet treat. “I have warned you numerous times to not furrow your brow. It adds years to your looks.” I ran my hand over my forehead to smooth out the gullies. “Much better. So why are you feeling so old?”

“It’s Opa.”

Her relaxed smile faded. The lime she had been nibbling on was dropped back into her spritz. Mother was no fan of her father. They barely spoke at all anymore. She had come into a vast hoard of money via a second marriage to a very wealthy vodka manufacturer in Russia and a massive trust fund. When her second husband died many years ago she set off to live her life as she saw fit, for her husband Dimitri was cut from the same cloth as my grandfather, so his death did not upset her greatly. He had been domineering and prone to name-calling when she stepped out of line.

My father, her first husband, had been a meek man who had worked in a shoe factory in Frankfurt where she had been attending Gothe University. She had loved him very much as a young woman. They’d met by fate when she had walked into his shoe shop to buy sandals. Opa had cut her out of the will for marrying below her station, and when my father was struck with a truck while riding his bike to work, she was left without any funds and a newborn baby. Opa took us in and set to grooming me for the role I now had. Mother got her trust fund back, remarried quickly, and went to live in Kiev for many years, leaving me with my grandfather as per his demands. Deep down I felt that she was much like her poodles, distrusting of most men, and not without good reason.

“What did the bastard do now?” she asked and so I told her. Everything. As she listened to Capucine’s tale, for she knew only the side of things that we had been fed over the years, her brown-green eyes filled with unshed tears. “When you confront him may I watch?”

I leaned up to gather a lone tear that had escaped. Mother and I had an odd relationship. She’d not been a good mother when I was younger, but now that I was older, I could see that she was a young woman running scared. Sadly, she ran from a tender man to a man much like her father. My childhood wasnot a great one but I was never hungry, or cold, or alone. I had money, friends at my boarding school, and a supportive friend in Edgar. Did I wish my mother had been there for me when I was a boy? Yes, of course. Did I wish we were closer now? Yes, very much so. But that was not how our course ran through life. I’d accepted it. She had as well. And while we were not sitcom family loving we had our moments. Like now.

“I will make sure you have a front row seat,” I promised.

A wicked smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Wonderful. Now, tell me about Capucine’s grandson. Whenever you speak his name your face lights up.”

“It’s complicated at the moment,” I replied.

“What in life is not? Is it love?”

“I think it is, yes, but I have to right a grievous wrong before I can return to New Hampshire to woo him properly.”

She reached out to cup my face. “I know I am not the best mother in the world, and have missed much, but all I ever wanted for you was to find a true love. Something that I seem unable to find or keep when I do stumble over it. Do what you must to be with that young man. I expect an invitation to the wedding.” She patted my face, sat back, and then began nattering away about one of her old friends and her ugly shoes.

I sank into my seat to listen. I was going nowhere and her company was most pleasant. The gassy dogs on the other hand…

THE WIND WASgentle as I stood in the driveway of the familial mansion in München-Grünwald. The elegant, white-plastered manse was perfection in all ways but not in the way that mattered. While it screamed wealth with its bourgeois traditions, facades and a small fountain in the middle of the circular drive, it was lacking the warmth of a true home. Eventhat cramped flat of Haider’s, filled with recipes, old 80s soap opera DVDs and cat dander was more a home than this eight-bedroom, twelve-bath, indoor and outdoor-pooled homage to greed.

Mother stood beside me, smiling as her dogs shit on his yard. Not that Opa would be cleaning up the piles. That would fall to the gardeners who toiled to keep the meticulous grounds up to my grandfather’s rigid dictates.

“He’ll be glad to see you,” Mother said as Edgar walked the poodles around the back. This was a showdown only family should attend. And yes, Edgar was like an uncle to me and I would not subject him to the detonation about to blow through. “Me? Not so much.”

“I can guarantee he will be glad to see me leave,” I commented to the side. She slid her arm through mine and we walked to the front door. The butler, Conrad, met us, welcoming us in warmly as he always did. An older man, portly but finely dressed, he had been in service here since I was a tot.

“I will let Herr Brauning know you are here. He will be most pleased to see you both,” Conrad said as he led us through the ground floor to the solarium where Opa spent much of his time now. “He’s been on oxygen the past few weeks.”

That didn’t sound good. He’d not mentioned that to me, and seeing the pallor on my mother’s face now, it was news to her as well. Given they rarely spoke that was not really surprising.

The large room at the rear of the mansion was warm and moist, as dry air was bad for his lungs Opa informed us. We strolled in, the two of us, a united front, and skidded to a halt upon seeing my grandfather napping in a ray of sun. He looked like a ghoul, as horrible as that was to say. I’d seen him a mere a month ago, and while he had been wan then this man wheezing into an oxygen mask as Boris, his resident nurse, read a book nearby was a shell of the man I’d last visited.

“Oh,” Boris said as he rose and placed his book in his empty seat beside a huge potted fern, “this is unexpected. Herr Brauning did not mention his family was coming for a visit today.”

“It’s a surprise,” I said softly patting mother’s hand as her fingers bit into my bicep. “He looks very pale.”

“Yes,” the big but gentle man in blue scrubs said. “He’s not been well. His lung sickness is worsening.” I could tell that just listening to him laboring to breathe. He’d been diagnosed with fibrotic interstitial lung disease three years ago. Many years of smoking followed by falling deathly ill with Covid during the pandemic had left him with severely limited lung function. “Should I wake him?”

“He is already awake,” Opa croaked as his bald pate lifted, his chin wet with drool. He studied us with sharp hazel eyes, his skin a rather sickly shade of yellow I’d never seen on him before. He did look as if he were on death’s door. “Both of you…at once. That is…a rarity.”

Life was fond of throwing a person curve balls. I’d arrived here possessed by a rage demon, set on confronting my grandfather forcefully, telling him exactly what I thought of him. Now, looking down on this shell of a man laboring to draw in each breath I found that my ire was changing into pity. What kind of person would I be to rant at a man who clearly had little time left among us?

“We ran into each other at an airport,” I tossed out. Mother, who now appeared as washed-out as Opa, nodded then fell silent at my side. She was never one to fight back. Which was why she had married twice, trying desperately to get away from this house and grandfather’s control, only to be pulled back into his web when fate turned cruel.

Opa motioned to some wicker chairs near where he sat. “Come sit. Tell me…why you both…are here at once. Good news…on the Aubert front…I assume.”

Mother said little, she rarely did to him, so I escorted her to a seat, got her settled, and then sat down directly in front of him. Boris came over to adjust Opa’s mask as the oxygen concentrator whirred softly. The machine’s soft sound could barely be heard over Opa’s rasping attempts to breathe.

“The flight was pleasant,” I said, sitting forward, elbows to knees, to look him in the eye. “I wished to speak to you about Capucine Aubert, yes.”

I caught the flicker of something ancient and unhappy in his eyes. He coughed several times, harsh racking expulsions of air that left him winded. Boris, ever diligent these past few years, stood close at hand in case he needed more meds to manage his breathlessness.

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