The Road to York:
If he had thought that the giggles, exhaustion, and hysteria were bad, the silence was that much worse.
They'd been driving for two hours in utter silence when he finally screwed himself up to shatter it.
He kept his eyes on the road, and quietly, deliberately, asked, "How is Pilar?"
If she was surprised by the question, she didn't show it. Instead, she continued to watch the English countryside pass by in the window. "She's fine. When she finished school, she moved to Paris and started studying design. I visited her right before the fellowship at JR and she had just started a small shop. Very pricey."
He chuckled. "Is she still with Bill?"
"No. I don't know all of what happened there. They're still close. Actually, Vanessa's been running Santos Systems."
"Really? Mama's letting an outsider run the business?"
A twitch of a smile played at her lips. "Your mother's entirely out of the business. She packed up and moved to Florida. I think she's doing some kind of interior design. Lots of rosewood and gold."
Sobering, she murmured, "The life just went out of her after the shooting. It kind of left Pilar hanging."
"Pilar didn't want to run the business. She trusts Vanessa, and for Vanessa, it was definitely a challenge. It was really rocky, the first few years... But it's holding its own now."
He nodded.
Gripping the steering wheel ever so slightly tighter, he asked, "How is my grandmother?"
She had to pause and turned toward him, "Danny,..."
"I know."
"It was so peaceful. She died in her sleep, about three years ago."
"I was away for most of the seven years in between, but I went to see her that Christmas... I was visiting Rick and Abby. The house was almost empty. Carmen was already down in Florida. Pilar had just moved to Paris. She really wanted your grandmother to go with her, but your grandmother ... she could be stubborn. She wanted to stay in Springfield with her friends, she said.
When I went to see her, I brought her a pound of French chocolate, nothing too sweet. We sat and talked for a while, drank tea. I think we made it through a good quarter pound of the chocolate right there. I really hadn't talked to her in a long time- I know when we were planning the wedding, I used to see her all the time, but afterwards... I just couldn't do it. Maybe I thought she would blame me...
I really should have talked to her earlier. Dad and Rick were understanding, but..."
"They never really wanted me for you." He continued to stare straight ahead.
"Yeah. But it was almost like talking to a piece of you. I took my shoes off and sat on her bed. We talked about our families. She made fun of Carmen's suits and Pilar's tops... Dietz... she could go on... At the end, though, she told me I should have children; I laughed. I tried to brush off the question. I think I said something silly like, if I couldn't have her grandson's children, I wouldn't have any."
He felt a pain in his chest.
"She kept saying I would have children. I thought she was getting tired, so I kissed her on the forehead and left. I kept meaning to see her again, but she died right after the holidays. I felt bad for a while; I thought the chocolates might have done it."
She screwed up her forehead. "Your grandmother didn't know about ... this..." she waved her hand, "did she?"
Puzzled, he looked at her, "No. Nobody knew."
"Because the shares of Santos Systems you left to her... she put them into this trust. It's pretty elaborate, Pilar and Vanessa were trying to break it last year when they were having some problems with Santos Systems... they needed some more stockholders votes for something... it ended up being okay, but Bill told me later that Ross had mentioned that there's a big loophole in the trust, a legal device that hasn't been used in centuries, when people would come back from the presumed dead decades later, wars, sea voyages, you know."
"I guess she just ... knew."
They passed another few miles of eierdown grey countryside as he absorbed that information. Finally, he turned to her and asked, "How are you?"