Page 84 of The Kiss Keeper
Bev tapped her chin. “Well, it was more like thirty-two hours. I met your grandfather around lunchtime on a Friday, and I married him a little after dinner on Saturday.”
“How could you know so fast?” Natalie asked.
“Sometimes, you just know,” her grandmother answered.
Nat leaned forward. “How did your whirlwind romance even start?”
“It was fifty years ago, and it feels like yesterday,” Hal began. “You see, Natalie, Charlie Linton was a friend of mine from college. He was quite impulsive back then and had gotten himself into some trouble playing cards. He owed the wrong people a good amount of money. When he told me that he was going back home to pick up some cash he had stashed in his childhood room and then planned on playing in a high-stakes poker game that night, I told him I wanted to tag along. But I was really there to try to keep him out of trouble.”
“And I grew up next door to Charlie. We’d been friends for years, and he introduced me to your grandfather,” her Grandma Bev added.
Natalie glanced between her grandparents. “And it was love at first sight?”
Her grandmother chuckled. “Oh, heavens, no! I thought your grandfather was a hooligan.”
“You see, Nat, your Grandma Beverly insisted on coming with us to this underground card club. Once Charlie was losing, we tried to get him to leave, but he wouldn’t. When he ran out of cash, he pulled a deed from his pocket and told us he was going to bet some land in Maine that had been left to him. I didn’t want his family land falling into the hands of some gangster, so I bought my way into the game.”
She watched her grandfather closely. “And that’s when you won what became Woolwich Cove, right, Grandpa?”
“Yes,” he answered with a solemn nod.
“But that’s not all. Tell her, Hal?” her grandmother nudged.
Her grandfather sighed. “Charlie had gotten pretty drunk after losing everything. I don’t think he remembers much after signing the deed over to me. We brought him home, and then your grandmother and I went back to the card club.”
Natalie cocked her head to the side. “Why?”
“That’s what I kept asking your grandfather on the drive back over! I was livid! I thought he was going back to gamble.”
Natalie searched her grandfather’s eyes. “What did you go back for, Grandpa?”
“To pay Charlie’s debts,” the man answered.
Natalie sat back. “You’re kidding?”
Grandpa Hal’s cheeks grew the slightest bit pink. “Your grandmother wasn’t wrong. I was a bit of a hooligan and a card shark in my day. So, I had the money.”
“But that was all your grandfather’s money—every last cent. And I knew the minute that he went back to that club and paid off Charlie’s debt that he was the kind of man I could spend my life with,” her grandmother answered.
“And then there was all the kissing,” her grandfather added, causing her grandmother to blush, and the twist of a grin pulled at the corners of her grandfather’s mouth. “And it wasn’t all my money. We found a crinkled one-hundred-dollar bill in the glove box of my old Chevy. That’s what I used to pay for your grandmother’s ring, and then, we spent the money we had left on the hotel room we stayed in for our wedding night when we—”
Nat closed her eyes and shook her head. “Fast-forward through that part, please,” she blurted, not ready to picture her grandparents like that when a question popped into her head. “And what did Charlie do when he learned you got married?”
Her grandmother Bev’s expression grew serious. “My sister told me that when Charlie found out I’d married Hal, he packed up that day and moved out west.”
Natalie glanced between them. “You didn’t tell him that you’d paid off the gangsters?”
Hal sat back and steepled his fingers. “I have a feeling Charlie knows what I did, but I didn’t need to rub it in his face.”
Natalie’s thoughts spiraled. “Did you ever consider giving the land back?”
Her grandparents shared a serious look, and Grandpa Hal nodded.
“We’d considered it. But when we got here, I knew we’d done the right thing by keeping it. When Charlie looked at this land, he only saw dollar signs. But the moment we arrived and stared out at the ocean, we knew this place was special. We knew we were meant to be stewards of this land and do our best to share the beauty of this perfect slice of Maine with as many deserving people as possible.”
Natalie stared out the window toward the ocean and imagined her grandparents, young and wild and free, staring out at the sea and promising to make a life together.
Her grandfather patted her cheek. “Here’s the thing. Life is like the tides. The tide comes in, and the tide goes out. All you can do is accept what it brings and go from there.”
