"So I have two grandmas?"
"You have two grandmas," I said.
"And my dad loved my mom?"
"More than anything, for one perfect summer."
"And I came from that?"
"You came from that. You came from love, baby. You always did. I just didn't know how to tell you until Margaret came."
He thought about it, the serious way he thinks about everything.
Then he climbed into Margaret's lap — this stranger who was not a stranger, this grandmother he'd never met — and he hugged her, and she held her dead son's child for the first time, and I watched ten years of two separate griefs become, in one afternoon, one shared family.
PART 5 — FINAL
That was two years ago.
Margaret is part of our lives now — fully, completely, the second grandmother my daughter arranged for her son before she died. She lives close enough to come for Sunday pancakes, and she does, most weeks. She teaches my grandson things about his father — Michael loved baseball too, it turns out, which explained something I'd always wondered about, where the boy got it, because it certainly wasn't from me. She brought photos. My grandson has his father's face on his wall now, and his father's old baseball glove, and his father's story, told by the woman who loved that boy first.
