The Best Thing

by Zapata, Mariana

  I clung to that memory like it was a lifeline sent to save me. A lifeline to one of the best days in my life—and a reminder that I’d had so many best days over the course of it. A reminder of just how fucking lucky I was that maybe life hadn’t always been easy, but it had been—it was—amazing.

  And that was what my grandpa had always wanted for me. For all of his loved ones.

  Which was why I tied that memory to my wrist and let it lift me up like an oversized balloon.

  This was the beach where Grandpa Gus and Peter had gotten married after nearly thirty-one years together. Right here. Well, close by. Under the Hawaiian sun, with enormous smiles over both of their faces, while my gramps cracked jokes at his groom and at the not-so-small party they’d invited to watch them each put a ring on it. A marriage thirty years and a lot of sacrifices and a lot of love in the making, that had only happened once Peter had retired and Grandpa Gus had decided to sell Maio House.

  “You and Peter are Maio House to me, Len. And I’m tired of keeping it a secret. You have a life here, a career. You’re not giving that up for the gym,” he had reasoned with me a month after Jonah’s contract with the Kobe Chargers had ended, days after he had signed a new three-year contract with his old team in Auckland.

  And sure enough, six months later, Maio House had been sold to a group of three former fighters who had pooled their money together. It had been a little bittersweet, but just a little. Because how the hell could I have been upset when the moment after we’d talked about his decision, he’d asked, “What do you think about a wedding on a beach in Kauai?”

  I’d swear I could still hear the way the ordained minister had asked my creature of ancient evil if he took Peter as his lawfully wedded husband, and how he’d answered, “I guess so” with his trademark little smirk before his face had sobered and he’d added, “Yes. For the rest of my life.”

  Another fucking choke appeared in my throat, and I decided maybe I shouldn’t have delved into that memory so deeply because that time, I couldn’t keep my shit totally under wraps. The choke sprang up and out of my throat, and one single tear escaped my eye at the same time Jonah’s hand slipped out from under mine, and he threw a heavy, still-muscular arm over the tops of my shoulders. He sidestepped into me, his cheek slotting over the top of my head, and he snuggled me even as his own throat bubbled with deep chokes he was trying to hold back and mostly failing at. My sweet, wonderful man. The same man who had never given me a single reason to doubt or regret any of the decisions I’d made for him—for us.

  “Are you remembering the wedding?” Jonah asked in a voice just barely an inch tall, weary and about as soft as he was capable of as that still big body shook against mine with so much emotion it triggered another tear out of me.

  “Yeah,” I answered him, taking a sniff and wrapping my free arm around his waist to hold him right back. My other hand gave the one I was holding a squeeze.

  I wasn’t the only one mourning and trying hard not to, I remembered.

  We had all lost Grandpa Gus two months ago.

  My fucking watery nose betrayed me and made something wet that I wasn’t going to bother wiping off drip over the top of my lip and down the side of my mouth as I thought about the day that Peter had come into the kitchen, face pale and eyes stunned at first. How he had stood there for a moment while the rest of us looked at him expectantly. Not knowing what he was about to drop on us. Not knowing what had happened.

  And then he’d smiled gently, his throat had bobbed, and he’d said the last words I would have ever imagined, “Gus is gone.”

  He had left us at ninety-five years old, in what was probably the quietest moment of his life. In his sleep. Not fighting or arguing or being sarcastic or loving or anything like he was normally.

  I had lost my grandfather.

  Peter had lost his partner of half his life.

  Jonah had lost the man who had helped him with conditioning during each of the four off-seasons he’d had left in his career. A man who had become not just his children’s nanny or his wife’s best friend/grandpa/business partner in sports management, but his friend. His confidant. His own Granddad Gus.

  And Mo and Marcus had lost their Grandpa Gus. Their nanny/playmate/number one cheerleader. The best great-grandfather in the history of great-grandfathers.

  The greatest man to ever own the title of grandfather.

  A man I had missed every second of every day for the last two months. That we all had. Not just me.

  A man buried in a natural cemetery in his adopted country of New Zealand per his wishes. Why would I want to be all the way in Houston when you’re all here? he’d asked when he’d given us his instructions after becoming a permanent resident.

  The hand fitted against mine squeezed it for a moment before a lanky body turned into mine, threw his arms around my waist, tucked his head under my chin, and muttered in a choppy voice, “I miss him heaps, Mum. He made me promise him I wouldn’t cry, and it’s so… hard.”

  “Me too, buddy,” I agreed, wrapping one arm around him and keeping my other around Jonah. “We all do. It’s okay if you cry. He’d know it was just because we love him so much.”

  “He can be mad at both of us,” Jonah piped up as he turned his body toward his son too.

  Marcus, our fifteen-year-old who was a perfect physical mix of both of us, nodded against me even as he sniffed again. He was loud, opinionated, energetic, and fiercely loyal. Not as olive-skinned as Mo, his eyes grayer than brown, and hair lighter and straighter like mine, he was lanky and growing. I had a feeling that one day, when I wasn’t fighting back the black hole in my chest that had only shrunk a fraction in size over the last few weeks, I’d look at him and see that he was a replica of Grandpa Gus.

  One day.

  But for that day, he was still our baby.

  “Mum, Dad,” a familiar voice said from behind us. “Everyone is here. I think we can get started.”

  “All right, darling,” Jonah replied from over my head a moment before giving the top of it a kiss. “Ready, love?”

  I could do this. I could do it.

  I turned my head and gave the hand he had resting on my shoulder a kiss before nodding up at his so-loved face that had stayed just as handsome as ever over the years. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

  The three of us turned around to face away from the water then. There were easily thirty people scattered closely around the beach, but it was Peter I focused on. He was sitting in a chair with his cane leaning against his knees, with Mo kneeling on one side of him and Luna, my forever best friend even after being separated by an ocean nearly constantly for the last two decades, standing on his other side. Her husband and their three kids were right behind her. Their presence was just another reminder of how lucky I was. We had vacationed together just about every year, and I saw her when we’d traveled to Houston once a year to check on Grandpa’s house.

  My house now, actually. A house that had only been lived in for a month or two a year for a while. A house we could vacation in, but that would never be lived in full-time again.

  Oh, Grandpa. I miss you so much.

  The rest of the people on the beach were a mix of Jonah’s family members and people I reached out to who had kept in touch with my gramps over the years. People who had supported him after coming out. People who had called and emailed and visited while he had been with us.

  Jonah gave my shoulder a squeeze before letting his hand drop away for a moment before he rifled through his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper that he’d been entrusted with. “He’s the only one I trust not to read it before it’s time,” Grandpa had claimed, sliding me a look that said yeah, you know you’d read it if I left it with you.

  And he would have been right, because I had tried to convince Jonah to let me read it at least twice.

  And it was that thought that brought the first smile onto my face that day.

  He’d always known me better than anyone.

&nb
sp; Well, maybe he was tied with Jonah. And he would have been totally fine with that.

  Holding the paper with two shaky hands, one of the six loves of my life sidestepped into me until his biceps touched me, the side of his bare foot touching mine. I was his reassurance then, I knew. And this enormous man who had fought for every year of his career, who had put his family first every single time he was needed, who was the best friend, best father, best person I knew—tied with Peter—cleared his throat as he unfolded the piece of paper as he said, “I have a letter Granddad Gus wanted me to read to everyone.”

  He cleared his throat just as Marcus took my hand again and Jonah’s little toe touched mine. Peter smiled from where he was sitting, glasses shoved up onto the bridge of his beloved nose, and let out a deep, deep breath. It was then that I saw that Mo, twenty-one years old and as beautiful as her dad, had her hand through his, and Luna had his other one. Her left hand was linked through her oldest daughter’s. Her husband’s hands were on her shoulders.

  Her shiny eyes met mine, and we smiled at each other just as Jonah started again.

  “Dear everyone,” Jonah read. “Fuck you—wait.”

  Beside me, Marcus snorted this watery noise, but I looked up at Jonah to figure out what the hell he was reading. Sure enough, the lines across his forehead were wrinkled in confusion as those beautiful eyes moved across the sheet of paper… but it was the slow smile that crept across his face that surprised me. And the tear that bubbled up in the corner of my husband’s eye that he wiped off with a big index finger before saying, with laughter and pain in his voice, “He wrote in parentheses to point randomly around and say fuck you, point at someone else and say fuck you, and do that at least eight times.”

  I wasn’t expecting the laugh that burst out of my throat, much less Peter’s or Mo’s, but it happened. Even Marcus fully laughed. Jonah smiled over at me, lips pressing tight together before he read on with a shake of his head like he should have expected that.

  We all should have.

  That was Grandpa Gus. Even in death, he would want to fuck with us. I had loved that man with my entire heart for the entirety of the fifty-one years of my life, and somehow I loved him even more then than ever, and I hadn’t thought that was humanly possible.

  Jonah’s hand snuck over to squeeze my wrist for a moment before lifting the paper back up to his face and continuing on, but this time with laughter on his face and in his voice. “If you’re reading this, none of y’all better be crying. I’m not kidding. Not a single tear. But if you really need to, it’s okay. I would miss me too.”

  I laughed again as tears streamed out of my eyes and down my face, and I had to stoop to use Marcus’s shoulder to wipe them off as he dragged a skinny fist across his face to do the same. I glanced at Peter to find him smiling huge, not a single tear in his gaze as it focused on Jonah. But everyone else… we weren’t that strong.

  And my husband, my love, kept going. “I didn’t want a funeral because there’s nothing to be sad about, and I hate the color black. I hope at least one of you is wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I wanted you all to come and be together, to be happy, in one of the most beautiful places in the world. To remember the most important part of life is living it with people that you love and people that love you right back. It’s the greatest gift we can have.

  “Where you’re standing right now is where the best man I’ve ever known finally married me. He gave up his family, his career, and our home, for me. For our family. We had to keep what we had a secret for over thirty years so that our business would prosper, because we were scared of being judged and losing everything.

  “He gave me the best years of his life, and I tried to do the same, but as I look back on it now, I wish we wouldn’t have had to hide it for so long. I wished I had told every person in my life to fuck off, as my Lenny would say, and have had more years of our rings on each other’s fingers. But I think I would have felt that way even if we’d had a thousand of them. But it’s what we had to do, and it all worked out. What I’m trying to tell you all from the grave—”

  There were a few watery snorts, because he’d gone there.

  “Is this: I love you all, and I want you to remember now that I’m not around, to never forget what’s important. You’re each important. You’re each loved. And if you love something or someone, you don’t ever give up on it. Life’s not easy but hold on to the things that matter, even if you have to use some fingernails. I told one of you once that you don’t throw away the things that matter. Hold on for me. Fight for me, or like I’m behind you telling you that you better not quit,” Jonah read.

  He had told me that. I remembered. When he’d fired me so Mo and I could go to Japan to be with Jonah, that had been the sentence he’d said when he’d hugged me tight and set me free. Kind of. Because he’d followed me there and stayed with me for ten months out of the year.

  Jonah read a little more of the paper that was directly meant for his friends and the members of Jonah’s family that had come, and then this wonderful amazing man I had been lucky enough to spend the last two decades of my life with said, “Mo and Marcus, I love you two so much, and I’m so proud of you. I’m always here. I’ll always be listening for you. Jasper—” Jonah’s voice broke off with a laugh at the nickname the old vampire had never managed to totally drop even after so long. “—you are the second best man I know. It was a privilege knowing you—” He swallowed and glanced at me to whisper, “He called me son.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at him as I wrapped my fingers around his forearm and said, “He’s been calling you that behind your back for years, Dimples. He loved you.”

  He knew that. I knew he knew that. Jonah smiled before ducking down to give me a kiss on the nose. He straightened, swallowed hard, and nodded to himself. “Okay. There’s just a little more. To the two loves of my life—”

  Peter and I made eye contact then. My second dad. His smile hadn’t gone anywhere, and I’d swear his eyes sparkled from behind his glasses. I smiled at him too then, knowing he was fine between Mo and Luna, while I gave my own strength to these two guys of mine who needed me.

  “—you gave me a reason to live. And I’m going to haunt you both for the rest of your lives. That creaking noise you hear in the attic? It’s me. The shadow you see out of the corner of your eye? That’s me too. I love you both. You know that. You know what you mean to me. I love you all. I’m never far away. Do what you have to do to be happy, okay? No one else is going to do it for you.”

  Do what you have to do to be happy.

  Goddammit, Grandpa.

  I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry.

  Slipping my hand through Jonah’s arm, clutching Marcus’s hand close, I led them all toward Peter, and the next thing I knew, I had my cheek against his. Marcus was on one side of me, arm over his Grandpa Peter’s shoulder, and I had Jonah on my other side again, holding me close to his body with one arm, and the other around his mini-me, Mo. And Mo had her arm around Grandpa Peter too. From the weight on my back and on my arms, I knew we had been surrounded as well by another layer of love.

  Grandpa Gus was there too.

  I could feel him in my heart, and I knew he was in everyone’s then like he always would be. Where he belonged. Exactly where I knew he’d want to be.

  With his family. With the people who loved him the most. The group of us who loved each other the most. My past, my present, and my future. The best things to ever happen to me.

  And there was only one person in the world I could thank for it all.

  For the life I had that even on the worst, most frustrating day, I could smile.

  I love you so much, old man. Every good thing in my life has been because of you.

  Thank you for being the best grandpa/grandma/uncle/brother/best friend/soul mate/enemy I could ever ask for, I threw out to him, knowing he was always listening, because some things never changed.

  No vampire has ever been lov
ed as much as you, Grandpa Gus. Tell my dad I said hi.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you so much for reading THE BEST THING! I constantly sound like a broken record saying it, but I really do have the best readers in the world. Thank you so much for all of your support and love. You guys believe in me more than I believe in myself some days, and that’s something I can never repay.

  Eva, I don’t know what I would do without your eagle eye, honesty, friendship and your ability to do math, haha. And especially for knowing when I can do better. I can’t thank you properly with words, but I know you know how much I appreciate everything you do for me (and my books).

  Sita, I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, assistance with my kiwi slang, and awesome suggestions with Jonah’s character. Thank you so, so much for your help. Ryn, my blurbs would be pathetic without you. Thank you for always being willing to help. Letitia at RBA Designs, I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again: please don’t ever leave me. Thank you to Virginia and Kim at Hot Tree Editing, and Ellie with My Brother’s Editor for making my book less of a hot mess. Jeff, thank you for always squeezing me in for a formatting even when I have to change my dates at the last minute. Kilian, I’m so grateful for all your help.

  Thanks also to Jane Dystel, Kemi Faderin and Lauren Abramo of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret for all of their work with getting my books into different markets.

  To my friends who I know I’m forgetting: thank you for everything.

  To my Zapata, Navarro, and Letchford family, thank you all for always being so supportive and bragging to all your friends about my writing, haha. You’re the greatest families a girl could ever ask for. A very special thank you to my mom for being a great travel partner, always agreeing to be my assistant even before I tell you where we’re going, and for being more organized than I am.