Page 100 of Second Start: Family
“That’s enough,” the judge said.
Didn’t stop Gramps.
“Whichever way, it doesn’t mean I’m not those kids’ grandfather. You don’t say when it’s all. You’re not in charge, not any more than Naomi.”
“Your Honor!” Naomi’s attorney pleaded.
“Mr.—”
“Gramps,” he corrected the judge. “No cause to call me anything else. And it doesn’t mean,” he added more strongly, “I don’t know what’s best for them, even—”
“Sir—” the judge tried again.
“—if I couldn’t pull it off for my own girls. What?”
“Answer your daughter’s attorney’s questions. Do not go beyond the scope of those questions.”
“Well, do you want the truth or not? Because that’s what I gave you. Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?”
The judge chose to ignore that. “Mr. Larkin, do you have anything more to ask this gentleman?”
“No, Your Honor, he answered all my questions very well, as well as asking some good ones of his own.”
“Mr. Larkin—”
“I apologize, Judge.”
“I don’t,” Gramps muttered as he started unwinding himself from the witness chair.
Naomi jerked forward.
“How dare you. Howdareyou,” she practically spat in Gramps’ face. “You left us—”
“Your mother took you and—”
“Deserted us.”
“—neither of you girls ever wanted to come back even though—”
“To that hovel? Of course not.”
Kenzie heard a derisive snort from Pauline and saw Bexley put a restraining hand on her arm.
“—I fought in court to get the right. But I wasn’t going to force you into seeing me, whatever a court said.”
“If you’d live somewhere decent. If you could have provided us the niceties — that is all I want to give Dan, what I was denied in my childhood. Opportunities to get off that isolated ranch and—”
She spun from her father to Hall.
Following the motion brought the judge into the center of Kenzie’s view. She had one hand on her gavel, but made no move to pound it. She watched and listened to everything.
“It’s your fault — all of it. I don’t care what you say or how Annie stuck up for you saying she got pregnant on purpose to get away— you got her pregnant and took her away to that godforsaken ranch. That’s why she’s dead. It’s your fault!”
Kenzie felt as if the room went still. Like the air became so pressurized that no one could move against it, could barely even breathe against it.
Don’t say anything critical of Annie, Hall. Don’t say it.
They were the only coherent words she could assemble in her head, standing in for a jumble of thoughts about Dan, his anger, his dealings with his father, and Hall’s efforts to build a bridge to his son, and what he had to sacrifice to do it.
